


Speaking About Love And Death

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Series: Love Is A Different Kind Of Pain [1]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Additional trigger warnings in chapter notes, Ignores Season 3, Lodge dodge, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Psychological Trauma, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:40:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22997845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: Harry throws all his weight at the door, shoving it open far enough to get in and knocking them both down in the process. Dale rushes to close it again and then huddles on the floor behind it, arms wrapped around his knees. The lights are off and the curtains are shut, so it’s really hard to see for a second. When Harry’s eyes adjust he’s not actually ready for what’s here. A big stack of empty coffee cups piled against the wall. Sheets of Dale’s notepad scattered across the floor, scribbled and sometimes drawn all over. Dale himself - wearing pajamas, messy-haired, and clearly unshaven for at least five days.“What’s going on, Coop?” Harry whispers.
Relationships: Dale Cooper/Harry Truman
Series: Love Is A Different Kind Of Pain [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1718449
Comments: 70
Kudos: 81





	1. The Choice Of Disappearance

**Author's Note:**

> First and foremost, there's some disturbing shit in this fic. If mental health problems scare/trigger you, turn back now.
> 
> If you're only bothered by specific things regarding mental health, there will be a list of trigger warnings in the end notes of each chapter so you can skip down and check them if you want to make sure you'll be okay reading.
> 
> Bear in mind during this fic that this was 1989. Healthcare for psychiatric issues was essentially not a thing yet.
> 
> Consider yourself warned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

The phone rings. Harry picks it up after the first one. “Sheriff Truman.”

“Is Cooper with you?” demands Albert’s cranky voice from the other end.

“What?”

“Is. Cooper. With. You. Did you lose one of your two brain cells and no longer understand English, or can you answer now without making me repeat myself a third time?”

Harry growls. “No, he’s not with me. Why are you calling, Albert? Why not just call him? He’s still at the hotel, he said he’s on sick leave or vacation or something for awhile.”

“Give me enough credit to assume I’ve already tried contacting him several times,” Albert snaps. “He hasn’t answered. Now tell me, when was the last time you saw him?”

“What?”

“ _Stop saying ‘what’ to me all the time like an imbecile!_ ” Albert bellows. “These are simple questions, Truman! I expect simple, straightforward answers!”

“Albert you wanna tell me what the hell your problem is right now?” Harry yells back.

“He hasn’t answered the phone in two weeks. We’ve called him at all hours of the day and gotten zero response. When was the last time you saw him, talked to him, or had contact with him of any kind?”

Harry thinks for a second. “Uh… not for awhile,” he realizes. This is starting to make him feel alarmed. He hasn’t thought about it. For some reason he assumed Dale was busy with something, even though there’s no more case here and no reason for Dale to stay at all.

“How long?”

Harry pauses. “Not since… damn, not since he got outta the Lodge. So three or four weeks, now.”

“Go find him. Now.”

Albert hangs up and Harry just sits there like a dumbass for a minute with the phone still in his hand. He’s not sure he gets what this is and he needs a little bit for everything to pull together in his head… Dale refusing contact with the Bureau isn’t normal. Dale refusing to appear in town at all isn’t normal, either. Dale has just come back from a place that Hawk explained is somewhere between the physical manifestation of a nightmare and an abstract concept of hell. Those things aside, it snaps into place that Albert was even more of a bastard than usual because he’s terrified that something happened to his colleague.

Harry presses down the button on the phone for a few seconds and then dials Dale’s room… no answer. He does it again and still gets nothing. So he calls reception.

“Great Northern Hotel.”

“This is Sheriff Truman, can you tell me if Special Agent Cooper is still checked in with you in room 315?”

“One moment please, Sheriff.” A long pause. “Yes, he’s still here.”

“Has anyone seen him recently? Does he eat in the Timber Room?”

“I’m not sure…” Another, much shorter beat of silence. “It looks like there’s been orders of room service every so often, at least twice a day.”

So Dale’s still there, then.

“Alright, thank you. That’s all I needed.”

“Have a nice day, Sheriff.”

“You too.”

He hangs up and thinks a little bit more… the morning after Dale came back, he got up to go to the bathroom and went face-first into the mirror over the sink. He came out all bloody with a really lost look in his eyes and then tripped climbing back into bed. It seemed weird at the time, but Harry just thought Dale was still tired. Now, from the look of things, something’s up that nobody noticed until now.

Harry puts on his hat and leaves his office. “Lucy, I’m going to the hotel. If anyone comes looking for me, say I’m out on an emergency and you don’t know when I’ll be back. Hawk’s in charge for the rest of the day.”

“What happened, Sheriff?”

“I can’t talk, Lucy.”

Harry really wants to put on his lights and speed for the hotel, but he decides not to because it doesn’t make that much of a difference if he gets there in seven minutes instead of ten. Normally he can try to rationalize Dale’s behavior - whenever that man does something, there’s _always_ a reason behind it - but here nothing can make a complete picture yet. This is what’s in his head when he gets there and knocks on Dale’s door.

“Coop? It’s Harry, I wanna talk.”

Nothing.

“Coop, I know you’re in there hoarding room service trays. Albert called me just now, you got him real worked up from not answering your phone when he calls.”

Nothing.

Harry growls. “Okay, Cooper, you can open this door right now or I’m beating it in and then you get to explain what happened to Ben Horne.”

Nothing.

Harry doesn’t have the patience for this and it’s really starting to unnerve him, especially after the way Albert was being on the phone a few minutes ago, so he takes half a step back and starts kicking the door to try and force it open. Apparently that’s the right choice, because faint scrambling noises come from inside and finally it cracks open just slightly as Harry’s preparing another blow with his boot.

“Please go, Harry.”

“Coop, there’s some people worried about you.”

“It doesn’t matter. Please go away.”

“No. Let me in so we can talk.”

“Harry, please leave.”

“Come on, Coop, you can’t keep doing this.”

“I have to.”

“No you don’t. Let me in.”

“No.”

So Harry throws all his weight at the door, shoving it open far enough to get in and knocking them both down in the process. Dale rushes to close it again and then huddles on the floor behind it, arms wrapped around his knees. The lights are off and the curtains are shut, so it’s really hard to see for a second. When Harry’s eyes adjust he’s not actually ready for what’s here. A big stack of empty coffee cups piled against the wall. Sheets of Dale’s notepad scattered across the floor, scribbled and sometimes drawn all over. Dale himself - wearing pajamas, messy-haired, and clearly unshaven for at least five days.

“What’s going on, Coop?” Harry whispers, not getting up or really moving at all. He doesn’t want to startle his friend.

“There’s a hole torn in reality, Harry.”

“Yeah, the Lodge.”

“Ordinarily, malicious entities will sometimes escape through this hole to torment people,” Dale continues. “Living things, natural things, should avoid entrance to the Black Lodge. It’s unnatural for them to be present in its non-reality. Escaping from this non-reality is a monumentally difficult and grueling task… the Black Lodge will do everything in its power to trap you if you’re stupid enough to enter there. Assuming you can escape… you’re left with this hole. It becomes intertwined with your thoughts, your dreams, the essence of your very being. Eventually you begin to question reality when you’re conscious. During the periods of subconsciousness, dreams, your thoughts return you to that non-reality and you’re trapped again behind walls after walls of red velvet curtains. This can be best described as an alternative version of a hamster wheel. You run in circles but there’s no exit, only perpetually trying to escape from the thing that wants to keep you there with it to be devoured.” Dale’s breaths shake. “And I saw all of this. I’ve been through this hole, between reality and non-reality. I don’t understand at this point why I was able to leave the non-reality of the Black Lodge. Being awake is a separate type of nightmare.”

“Have you been sleeping, Coop?”

“Not long enough to dream. It’s an identical dream every time.”

“Maybe you should see a doctor, Coop. This isn’t… this isn’t okay for you to be doing this to yourself. Have you been eating?”

Dale’s head shakes. “It causes me to feel nauseous.”

“Maybe you should go someplace else,” Harry suggests carefully. “Change of scenery might help, maybe you wouldn’t have nightmares if you weren’t at the hotel anymore.” He pretends it hurts less than it does to say what he says next. “Maybe you need to go home.”

Dale frantically shakes his head and his whole body starts to tremble violently. “No, that’s no longer possible. It would be an irrational and pointless action.”

“Why?”

“Nobody will be capable of comprehending what I’ve experienced here.”

“I think you should see a doctor, Coop. You look like you’re getting really sick from holing up in here, especially if you’re not eating. This isn’t good for you.”

“There are no surgical instruments or medicinal compounds that can alleviate my symptoms.”

“You can’t stay here like this.”

“But it’s impossible for me to go anywhere else, Harry.”

“Well… come stay with me, then. You gotta get out of the hotel.”

Dale stops looking at him. The shaking intensifies. “There could be other holes,” he whispers. “Other points in time that lead out of reality. I might fall through one and be trapped there again.”

“You won’t,” Harry promises. “There’s just that one, and we know where it is, so we can keep you away from it. If there was more, Hawk would’a said something about it to me by now. It’s okay, Coop. You’re not stuck here. You can leave whenever you want.”

Dale looks at him again and takes several breaths.

“I’m afraid.”

Harry nods. “That’s okay. There’s probably a lot of good reasons for you to be.” He gradually gets up from the floor. “Here.” He moves close enough to pull Dale into a standing position. Dale’s shuddering too much and can’t really hold himself up for a moment, so he clings to one of Harry’s arms. “Why don’t you try to clean yourself up first, I can get all your stuff together for you and after that we’ll leave.” He realizes he doesn’t trust Dale not to fall and crack his head in the shower or something. “Or I can just stand here and wait if you want.”

It takes a second, but Dale nods. “Alright, Harry.”

He sticks Dale in the shower and takes a second to look at a couple of the pages on the floor. Dale normally has really good handwriting, but here it’s almost unreadable, and it’s not even in complete sentences which makes things even more confusing. One paper is covered in tallies with the caption _how many times did I run?_ scrawled across the bottom in tiny letters. Other things he randomly sees are _the stabbing happened again, did Leland lie to me in the hallway?, sometimes the screams ring in my ears_ and _Bob ate his soul._ If Harry read this in anyone else’s handwriting but Dale’s, he’d immediately jump to the conclusion that it was written by a crazy person who stopped taking their meds. He knows better. Dale’s not insane, just scared out of his mind by whatever it is he saw while he was in the Black Lodge. Harry doesn’t want to make any guesses, and he doesn’t need to. He understands that it must’ve been something or several somethings that were absolutely horrifying.

He stands in the open doorway of the bathroom and waits after that, trying to think about next steps. Dale really can’t be left alone so long as he’s like this, but Harry has to work. Maybe he should just take Dale to the hospital instead… no, there are bad memories for Dale there, too. Jacques Renault, Ronette Pulaski. And here in the hotel is being shot, Josie, Ben Horne. Dale’s never been in Harry’s house. There are no nightmares for him there. It’s the best place for him to be, probably, because there’s nothing that can hurt him from before.

Harry takes another moment to go through Dale’s stuff and get him some clothes to change into that aren’t his FBI suit, which ends up being those green pants with the cargo pockets and a plaid flannel shirt. Harry digs a little more - boxers, undershirt, socks, deodorant, shaving kit, comb. The toothbrush is already in the bathroom.

Except the mirror is still broken. How will Dale shave without it? Maybe that one thing can wait until Harry brings him home. Harry watches without really watching as Dale stumbles around drying himself off, then gives him his clothes and still watches without watching. It’s all movement in the corner of his eye, no details, because if Harry stares at him for too long he’ll probably get even more scared.

“You wanna wait until we get back to shave, Coop?” he asks, watching Dale brush his teeth over a sink full of broken glass that for some reason hasn’t been taken care of four weeks ago.

Dale shakes his head and spits. “I shouldn’t shave, Harry. My hands are too unsteady at this time and I’d very likely succeed in removing half the skin from my jaw and neck.”

Harry didn’t even think of that. “Oh. Uh…”

Dale plucks a large shard of mirror from the sink which doesn’t have toothpaste on it and looks himself over. “My appearance is unacceptable, however.” He drops the damn thing back in the sink and Harry hears it shatter. “I can’t leave looking like this, Harry.” Dale shakes his head and puts down his toothbrush without even rinsing it, probably because he forgot. “Harry.” He’s starting to shake really hard again. “Harry, I can’t leave looking like this.”

“Okay, it’s okay, Coop.” He thinks fast. “Uh. Do you want. I can do it for you. Maybe.”

Dale looks like he’s considering that. “Alright.”

Harry’s relieved. He’s got to get his friend out of this room and out of this place, and he’ll do pretty much anything to make that happen. He fumbles to get everything together and starts wiping shaving cream all over Dale’s face, which is weird in so many ways because he’s never had to shear anyone else before and he’ll be doing it backwards since this isn’t just facing himself through a mirror. He wipes off his hands - one holds the razor and the other holds the back of Dale’s head to keep him still. As Harry gets to work, he’s nervous to think what could’ve been in that place that’s so bad it can make someone as strong and confident as Special Agent Dale Cooper completely and utterly implode like this.

Almost twenty minutes of painstaking labor later, Harry wipes off the stray flecks of white foam and feels around Dale’s face for any bristles that he could’ve missed, refusing to feel awkward about it because now’s really not the time for that kind of shit. Satisfied, Harry lets Dale do the aftershave himself and goes out to gather up the scattering of notepad sheets. He knows he’ll end up looking these over later to try and figure this out a little more, but the idea also scares him. He doesn’t want to know more than he has to, more than whatever he needs to get Dale back to normal again.

He checks over his shoulder every so often - Dale’s gotten another fairly large piece of mirror glass and holds it in one trembling hand while combing his hair with the other, somehow looking uncertain even about that. Harry stuffs the pages into the pocket of his jacket and throws the rest of Dale’s stuff into the suitcase without really caring about its configuration; there’s nothing breakable in there, anyway. Dale’s still shuddering violently as he puts on his shoes, and Harry wonders if maybe he’s cold and not just exhausted. It’s only April, it’s not all that warm out yet even if there have been some pretty nice days already. Plus it’s raining out. Harry takes off his jacket and puts it on his friend.

“Come on, Coop. Let’s go get you checked out.”

He opens the door and leads Dale out by the shoulder, not letting go for anything until they’ve gotten to the desk. The process doesn’t take too long, at least, which means they’re getting into Harry’s truck only a few minutes after escaping the hotel room. Out in the gray light of daytime, Harry’s even more alarmed at how Dale looks: he’s lost probably ten pounds when he was already pretty skinny to begin with, his skin is pale like typewriter paper, the circles around his eyes are so dark it looks like he got punched. Dale’s almost ruined right now. What would’ve happened if Harry didn’t come rescue him from himself today?

All the nervous energy seems to disappear as Dale sits, pulling the door shut after him and just sinking into the seat without buckling himself in. He’s not really looking at anything specifically, just staring forward through the windshield as the raindrops hit it. Maybe he’s watching those.

“Coop.”

Dale doesn’t answer.

“You’re coming home with me now, okay?”

Nothing.

“Okay,” Harry whispers, not bothering to say anything about the seatbelt as he straps himself in and turns the engine. “We’re not stopping anywhere, we’ll just go straight there so you can get some sleep.”

“I’d like some coffee,” Dale finally mumbles, still not looking.

“No, absolutely not, Coop. No more coffee. If you have any more coffee your heart’ll probably just explode and we can’t have that.”

The drive to his house is eerily quiet. In all the time Harry’s known Dale, he pretty much never shuts up unless it’s really important, barely stopping to take a breath every five sentences or so. For him to be present, but completely silent this way, is beyond disturbing. Harry doesn’t know how to fix this. He wants to so badly, but he’s not sure he actually can. Maybe nothing can fix this.

“I may disappear,” Dale informs him when they’re about a minute and a half away, startling him.

“What?”

“I may disappear.”

“Why?”

“The Black Lodge. It’s reasonable to assume that it’s unsatisfied with the fact that I was able to leave and return to reality. More of its agents may appear in order to snatch me back into its control.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Harry promises.

“It’s not your choice, Harry.”

Dale’s voice is flat and ominous, now. Harry’s skin prickles and he tells himself it’s just because his shirt got wet from being out in the rain with no jacket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Harry arrives at the hotel and discovers Cooper in an extremely disheveled state that indicates he's stopped taking care of himself.  
> 2\. Though not named, Cooper has a brief panic attack.


	2. Wasting Days On The Important Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

Dale sleeps for almost two days without stirring once.

At first Harry tries to get some stuff done after calling the station and letting them know he’ll be out for the rest of the week. He tidies up his living room and kitchen, he puts all of Dale’s clothes in the wash even if they look like they’re probably clean - this includes the grubby blue pajamas Dale wore for at least two weeks straight while surviving off of coffee and nothing else. He thinks about calling Albert but decides not to because he’s not capable of having a conversation with that cranky son of a bitch right now. He takes a gamble and runs to the store and back for a few things and cooks a whole bunch of soup, because maybe Dale can choke that down.

After that, Harry mostly just sits and waits.

Dale looks like a corpse, still and quiet as a stone in Harry’s bed under Harry’s blankets and wearing sweatpants and a flannel that Harry let him borrow to sleep in. Every so often Harry will go over and feel his neck or his back… there’s always a pulse, there’s always very slow breaths being drawn. He’s still so pale and thin. More than once, Harry has to stop himself from comparing how Dale looks now to how Laura looked when they found her on the beach. It’s too morbid to think things like that. Dale lives.

On the first night, as Harry sits in the doorway watching his friend’s slumber continue to disguise itself as death, he tries reading some of the pages from Dale’s notepad. They’re confusing and scary, and they don’t explain a god damn thing.

 _and still I continue to question the purpose of the doppelgangers_ _  
_ _are they Bob’s children? I recall this having been said at one point_ _  
_ _there were many familiar faces present, including my own. I saw Laura, Madeline, Leland, the little man in the red suit. their eyes were always milk-colored and looked into my soul_ _  
_ _did Leland lie to me in the hallway? he claimed in slow clumsy words not to have killed anyone. it’s perplexing because he at no point was in control of his actions, however Bob used him as a tool for murder. we were prepared to prosecute him even knowing this… so who can we truly blame? perhaps we should blame ourselves for failing to understand sooner_

Harry sets that sheet aside and selects another one at random. They’re all out of order.

 _it confuses me that I was capable of escape_ _  
_ _Bob sent after me a copy of myself with wrong-looking eyes, if caught I may have been permanently trapped or possibly destroyed the way Windom Earle was_ _  
_ _some of the copies screamed_ _  
_ _the little man in the red suit referred to these as “doppelgangers”_ _  
_ _each of them was subtly wrong in some way, and at points they would scream, some would move in a strange disjointed manner, some would stay still and simply watch_ _  
_ _sometimes the screams ring in my ears, it keeps me from meaningful rest_

Harry sets that one with the first one, on the floor by his foot. He takes a long sip of coffee and picks up the next one… it’s a lot less coherent than the first two.

 _we can’t ascertain the interpretation of fire walk with me_ _  
_ _I don’t think there is one_ _  
_ _often my shoes will carry me across thorns and stones_ _  
_ _beneath the thorns are tiny bones that could possibly be from children or small animals_ _  
_ _are these what I see when I’m awake or asleep? at times, I can no longer recall_ _  
_ _the sky rains blood at night, but I can’t see it through the darkness_ _  
_ _there are also noises that remind me of screams_ _  
_ _they repeat and I can never find where they come from to make them stop_ _  
_ _the only words I have are my own_ _  
_ _I can request only one thing_ _  
_ _in this manner, my eyes will remain open, and I’m safe from the red walls, from Bob_

Harry can’t figure out parts of that. Was Dale hallucinating or having nightmares? From the sounds of it, even Dale wouldn’t be able to answer if Harry asked him. After thinking about the ‘screams’ for a few minutes he decides that was probably the phone ringing, a worried and angry Albert on the other end. Somehow Dale still knew enough to call room service and order coffee to try and stay awake so he could keep back the nightmares.

The next one’s even worse.

 _if I peel away my flesh will I still find myself underneath? or will Bob be there?_ _  
_ _so far the peeling only shows me plenty of blood_ _  
_ _the pain keeps me awake for longer_

Harry drops the paper and jumps out of his chair without reading the rest of it. When he put Dale’s pajamas in the wash, he’d noticed dark stains all over the left sleeve, but he’d thought it was just coffee that got spilled. With the lights off and everything, it makes sense how he could’ve missed something like this, but that doesn’t make him feel better. He tugs away the blankets and rolls back the flannel, finding wounds covering Dale’s forearm in all kinds of lengths and depths. Seeing this makes him feel sick, but he can’t just leave it like that, Dale could get an infection or something.

Harry digs up a first aid kit out of his hunting and camping supplies, and he goes back into his bedroom with a roll of paper towels in the other hand. He piles about twelve of them under Dale’s arm to protect the bedding and then pours rubbing alcohol over everything. Dale, incredibly, doesn’t even notice. He just keeps sleeping and looking like he should be in a coffin instead of a bed. Harry’s fingers tremble as he wipes up the mess, then he smears Neosporin across pretty much Dale’s whole arm before sticking gauze pads to the gashes. Lastly, a bandage roll to keep everything covered up. He can’t believe Dale lost it enough to do something like this.

After taking care of the wrappers and paper towels, Harry just stands still for a moment, watching Dale and breathing a little too hard. He doesn’t want to look at any more of those scribblings after that. Instead he goes over and tucks Dale back in under the blankets. He starts to get scared of what’ll happen when Dale wakes up again.

Harry sits for some more after that. He takes the papers and puts them in the kitchen first, as far away from himself as possible. Then he drinks coffee and thinks. Dale probably came about an inch and a half from losing his mind completely from the very short look Harry got of those damn pages, but somehow was more or less lucid in the hotel this morning despite being overwhelmed with fear. Harry wonders how that happened, but he’s also afraid of the answer. He’s not even sure there is one, or if Dale will be able to explain it to him if there is. He’s not sure Dale will be able to explain anything on those notepad sheets.

He gets up and checks Dale’s pulse one more time, then takes off his socks and lies down on his couch with a blanket to try and get some rest. It’s not merciful to him - Harry sleeps in fits, usually with vague bad dreams that he can’t remember when he wakes up for the hundredth time in four hours. When the sky is starting to lighten through the window he gives up and makes more coffee.

Harry watches over Dale for awhile longer from the bedroom doorway. He drinks coffee and eats a couple pieces of toast - a less exciting alternative to donuts - and quietly waits for Dale to wake up.

Dale doesn’t. He keeps sleeping, breathing so slowly that Harry can’t even see it and not moving a hair’s width away from where he’s been for the last seventeen hours. At sixish, Harry leaves again and stares at the papers on his counter. He really should finish reading those, there’s probably important stuff in there, but so far all they’ve done is scare the living shit out of him. Eventually he realizes that if there’s anything else written down like what happened to Dale’s arm, he should at least know about it so he can try to help. Harry swallows even though there’s nothing in his throat and picks them up again, heading back to the chair he stuck in the doorway of his bedroom.

 _Windom Earle had more time and space to delve into the Lodge due to his reaching it several hours ahead of me_ _  
_ _I only saw Annie in visions… I cannot be sure it was her, as she often changed places with Caroline while affording me no warning_ _  
_ _perhaps they were both figments of my imagination, of my longing_ _  
_ _but then there should’ve been others there as well, others who I’ve come to care for_ _  
_ _presumably the Bureau will read these notes so I’ll avoid naming names for the time being_

And the page ends. Harry guesses this is probably one of the earliest ones Dale wrote, because it actually makes sense and doesn’t contain anything horrific. The next one is just a drawing, a crude diagram of a room with a hall outside of it. There’s a couple squares labeled “chairs” and in the hallway there’s a statue and a doorway. Underneath, Dale wrote _repeats on an endless loop but with varying contents_ in small letters.

After that, though, it’s back to the insanity.

 _Bob ate his soul_ _  
_ _will Bob eat my soul too?_ _  
_ _do I still have a soul left to be eaten?_ _  
_ _I can no longer be sure_ _  
_ _so many things there have looked straight into me_ _  
_ _my skin is made of glass_ _  
_ _everyone will look now and see that I have no soul_ _  
_ _my eyes, too, are windows_ _  
_ _everyone will look now and understand that I’m no longer a human being_ _  
_ _just a shell, because Bob has stolen my being from me_ _  
_ _I’ve done something I can’t be forgiven for_ _  
_ _this is why he could steal my soul_

Harry shakes his head. He tries to think if it’d be better or worse if Dale hadn’t ripped out all the pages and they’d been left in order in the notepad. On the one hand, it would be a much less confusing picture, maybe at least a little easier to understand. On the other there would be a slow but clear descent into madness, and Harry doesn’t know if he could handle seeing everything laid out that way. He picks up the next one and thinks it was probably done towards the end - he can barely read the letters, but it’s only one sentence, filling every line with jagged black ink-marks.

 _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_ _  
_ _please someone help me_

Harry sets that one down on the “read” pile and for a few seconds thinks about calling Hawk and asking for help. But what could Hawk possibly do to fix this situation? Should Harry even tell anyone about this at all? He doesn’t want anyone else to see Dale like this, either. So it seems like they’re both trapped for now - Harry by obligations to keep his suffering friend safe from scrutiny, and Dale by his very own mind after it turned on him.

He digs through his closet and comes up with another blanket, which he puts over top of all the ones Dale’s already piled under. Harry doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to be doing right now. Maybe this will help. Maybe it’s the right thing. He has no way to know.

Another couple hours, another mug of coffee, spent watching as Dale lies completely still. Harry doesn’t know if he’s waiting for Dale to wake up or just to move at all, but he’ll sit and wait for one of those things to happen. He leaves to go into the kitchen and make himself a sandwich and when he comes back nothing’s changed. This is starting to drive him nuts.

The phone rings and Harry jumps so hard he probably could’ve hit his head on the ceiling. It spears through the whole house, puncturing the silence and making him run over to answer before it can wake up Dale. For some reason it seems important for Dale to wake up on his own.

“Sheriff Truman.”

“Is Cooper with you?” comes Albert’s voice, just like yesterday.

Harry sighs. “Yeah, Albert, he’s with me.”

“I need to speak with him.”

“You can’t. He’s sleeping.”

“Irrelevant. Put him on the phone.”

“Albert, I’m not sure I could get him to wake up even if I wanted to right now,” Harry growls. “You have no idea what kinda state he was in when I found him. He’s not getting up yet, you’re not talking to him, and I’m not arguing with you about it.”

“What kind of state? Describe it to me in detail.”

“I don’t know, uh…” Only one word comes to him, and he hates himself for using it because it might not even be true. “Crazy.”

“Crazy? How so?”

“It doesn’t matter. I got him out of the hotel, he’s with me now and he’s safe. I’m gonna keep an eye on him for a few days.”

“Since you’re not feeling particularly cooperative at the moment, Truman, I’ll be over to your part of the ass-end of nowhere in approximately two days and four hours from now. Coop hasn’t turned in a report yet detailing the resolution of whatever the hell’s going on over there and that’s so far from the natural order of things it’s generally more likely that you and I would ever agree on any subject. Ergo, something’s seriously wrong and Gordon wants me to find out what. Since you won’t facilitate that, I’ll just have to fly out there and badger you until you comply.”

“Albert, I can’t put him on the phone because I can’t wake him up!” Harry yells, frustrated. “He’s not going to wake up until he does it on his own, he was keeping himself awake as much as possible _on purpose_ for weeks by downing mug after mug of coffee in his hotel room! This isn’t on me, it’s on him, and you showing up to torment him won’t help!”

A beat of silence follows. Sadly, it doesn’t last long enough before Albert’s talking again.

“You need to tell me how he was behaving when you found him.”

Harry sighs and does his best to describe what he saw. “He still talks the way he normally does… y’know, that kinda overly-wordy thing he does. But he seemed like a hurt animal or something.” He sighs again and then swallows. “Albert… he hurt himself. On purpose. I didn’t notice until I got him back here, but he dug his arm all up with a piece of the bathroom mirror. I looked through his notes, I guess he was worried he’d find _Bob_ hiding underneath or something.”

“Sounds like dissociation,” Albert remarks. Another short pause. “Listen carefully, Sheriff. Don’t take your eyes off him for a second when he wakes up. Until I get there and figure out exactly what’s going on in his head, consider him an extreme danger to you and to himself. Don’t argue with him, hassle him, or provoke him in any way. Don’t even touch him if you can help it.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s fragile and putting it nicely you’re a clumsy dipshit who’ll probably just make everything worse because you don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“Tell me how you really feel, you self-righteous abrasive pain in the ass,” Harry snarls.

“I didn’t know you knew words that big.” Albert stops, a little longer this time, and then sighs. “Ignoring all of that for the moment, Truman, if this issue runs even half as deep as I think it does for Coop we’ll have to put our differences aside for awhile once I’m back in town. The only one who knows what happened in that very literal hellhole is him and from your descriptions so far it seems probable he won’t respond to me particularly well when I arrive. It may end up being that I have to speak to him through you.”

“What? Why?”

“He likes you. You’re safer for him than I am. From your very limited information I’d guess an extreme amount of trauma. But he let you take him home. That’s a good sign.”

Harry suddenly feels like he can breathe again when Albert says that. He didn’t even know he was choking until now.

“Okay. Well. Good.”

“Yeah,” Albert snorts. “I’ll have to pack for my flight. When he wakes up, pay attention to everything he does so you can describe it to me when I get there. Remember what I said about not provoking him.”

“Will do.”

They both hang up and Harry goes back to his vigil. Dale’s still static in the bed.

No matter how much he doesn’t want to, Harry picks up the papers again. There’s at least twenty more of these damn things that he has to get through and if Dale hurt himself in any other ways Harry needs to know sooner rather than later. Thankfully, the one he has now seems to be the first page - it’s lucid, clear, and with good handwriting.

 _Diane-_ _  
_ _I apologize for this primitive format, but on my return from the Black Lodge my microcassette recorder seems to have stopped functioning. I replaced the tape and the battery to no effect, and until I can acquire a new one I’ll be forwarding papers to you in its place. Following this will be the details of my strange and frightening journey into what Deputy Hawk at one point referred to as “the physical manifestation of a nightmare”, which hopefully I’ll be able to make as coherent for you as possible._

Harry’s surprised - for some reason it didn’t even occur to him to wonder why this was all scribbled out instead of on tape. He’s also kind of glad, because if he had to hear Dale’s voice saying these things instead of just reading them on paper he knows it would be too much for him. He reaches for the next paper, and it’s unfortunately one of the later ones.

 _the stabbing happened again_ _  
_ _but twice_ _  
_ _at first I could only feel it_ _  
_ _there was a significant amount of blood_ _  
_ _but my blood felt strange and wrong_ _  
_ _all of that place is strange and wrong_ _  
_ _it was cold and viscous like liquid soap_ _  
_ _at the time I could smell acetone_ _  
_ _the second time Windom Earle was there_ _  
_ _he demanded that I forfeit my soul_ _  
_ _I agreed_ _  
_ _and the stabbing happened again_ _  
_ _but Bob appeared and destroyed him_

Harry frowns - why in god’s name would Dale agree to forfeit his soul? He wonders if this even happened or if it was a hallucination.

 _the screams are getting louder_ _  
_ _I can never silence them_ _  
_ _where have I gone? I can’t be sure anymore_ _  
_ _it seems my shoelaces have transformed into worms_ _  
_ _I believe my toenails go missing when I close my eyes_ _  
_ _I don’t remember why it’s important for these details to be recorded_ _  
_ _who exactly is interested in this information?_ _  
_ _perhaps I’ll stop writing after this_  
_although, someone is interested to know these things_ _  
it may be possible that I am the one screaming_

Harry shakes his head and puts that one aside. He wishes Albert had called two weeks sooner. He stops reading for awhile again, instead trying to think. What’s Dale going to be like when he wakes up? At this point Harry’s not convinced his friend won’t be a completely different person and he’s not sure how he can deal with having a psychotic stranger in his house. That idea terrifies him and he works really hard for a few minutes to convince himself that no, it won’t be like that. Dale only got this bad because he hasn’t been sleeping. That’s all. When he wakes up he’ll be okay again, or at least better than he was yesterday.

Except Dale still hasn’t woken up.

Most people move in their sleep, even a little bit. At least that’s what Harry’s heard. He knows he does, anyway, because he never comes to on the same side of the bed he laid down on the night before. But Dale might as well have been frozen in place. Harry stops himself from comparing Dale to Laura again. Dale’s alive. Dale’s alive. Dale’s alive… is he, though?

Harry gets up, walks over, feels Dale’s neck.

His fingertips find a pulse right away.

Harry sighs, rolls his eyes at himself, and sits back down. He got worked up over nothing again. If anyone ever saw him doing this shit he’d never hear the end of it. But the idea nags him quietly - is there such a thing as caffeine poisoning? The amount of coffee Dale drank in two weeks was beyond absurd.

Harry sits some more. He eats occasionally, has coffee, thinks. He always watches Dale even though it’s pointless. Dale’s not going to get up anytime soon. He reads some more of the lunacy that Dale scrawled, finding nothing important except stuff to give him bad dreams tonight. He’s not sure how, but he manages to waste the entire day with these non-activities, because when he looks at the clock it’s almost ten and Dale still hasn’t stirred. Harry gets nervous.

“If you don’t get up by noon tomorrow I’m calling Will,” Harry threatens, looking at Dale as he does. Predictably, he gets no answer.

Harry turns off all the lights in the house and lies down on his couch. He’s afraid to close his eyes after the stuff he’s read today, and he starts to understand at least a tiny bit of how Dale felt. When his eyes do close, there’s nothing terrible behind them, and he sleeps a little better than he did last night at least. They open again at about six thirty in the morning to the sound of something getting smashed, and when he looks it’s Dale, who’s dropped a coffee mug on the kitchen floor.

Harry gets up immediately and goes over - Dale won’t make eye contact, which is worrying.

“Coop?”

Dale turns his whole head away and picks at the bandage on his arm.

“Hey, don’t play with that,” Harry says quietly, reaching out and gently pulling Dale’s hand back by the wrist. He’s shaking. That can’t be good. “Coop, say something. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Harry.”

Harry nods. “It’s okay. Uh. Here, siddown, I’ll make coffee.”

Dale’s awake and not someone else. Harry doesn’t care that he’s down a mug or that he gets a piece of that mug jammed into the sole of his foot. Dale’s awake. That’s the most important thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Harry reads Cooper's notes that he found on the floor of the hotel and they contain many disturbing and frightening ideas/details.  
> 2\. Cooper at one point dissociated and attempted to cut open part of his body to see if BOB was hiding inside of him; this is not shown, but Harry discovers the wounds in his arm by accident and tends to them.  
> 3\. In Cooper's notes, there are strong indications that he suffered delusions and hallucinations after purposefully becoming sleep-deprived to escape from his constant nightmares.


	3. Nonsensical Distress

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Life is stupid. Here's the next chapter 24 hours early.
> 
> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

“Coop, uh… I don’t wanna upset you, but Albert’s flying up to see you. He should be here tomorrow afternoon sometime.”

“I don’t wish to see him at this time.”

“I know you don’t. Neither do I, but I couldn’t talk him out of it. I’m sorry, Coop.”

“You have no reason to apologize for Albert’s stubbornness, Harry.”

“Yeah, but I’m sorry you feel bad.”

Dale nods slightly and drinks his coffee. “I’m under the distinct impression that I’ve said or done something to severely frighten you recently.”

“I’ve been reading the stuff you wrote when you locked yourself in your room with twenty gallons of coffee.”

Dale visibly stiffens. “How much have you seen?”

“I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve pages. You were really losing your mind.” Harry gestures loosely to Dale’s arm. “It’s how I found out about that and fixed you up.”

“Oh. Yes.” Dale doesn’t seem like he could possibly be more uncomfortable right now if he was sitting on three dozen thumbtacks. “It seemed like a logical course of action at the time.”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Harry offers, quietly thinking to himself that that’s what Albert - unfortunately - is for instead.

“I think there are more than a handful of things you do deserve an explanation for,” Dale argues. “My recent nonsensical behavior has caused you significant emotional distress.”

“Why did you not want to let me into your room?”

“I was aware of my disordered state and had no desire to be seen. Fortunately you seemed to take it in stride at the time.”

“Coop, I didn’t even… I didn’t even know something was wrong until Albert called me,” Harry admits. He feels his ears turning red. “I thought maybe you were fishing with Garland again or you were busy with something. I wish I noticed sooner and I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“I forgive you.”

“I don’t think you should. If I wasn’t so damn thick a whole lotta this could’ve been avoided.”

“Harry, you weren’t present for the numerous mental breakdowns I suffered in the first three days after my return. You’re not at fault.”

Harry waits a little before talking again. “You don’t have to answer this one, Coop, but were those nightmares or hallucinations you were writing about?”

“An indecipherable combination of the two. The lines between them are so thin and blurred as to be nonexistent. I would slip into a subconscious state for several minutes but immediately startle myself back into wakefulness. Not that it helped.” Dale takes a sip of coffee. “Harry, please understand that my current calm and rational disposition is temporary. Ordinary things in an ordinary world seem to hit pressure-points in my subconscious that cause a state of crippling anxiety, including an inescapable notion of impending doom. Essentially, I’ll be how I was when you saw me in the hotel.”

“Can’t you stop it?”

Dale shakes his head after a moment, looking down at the table. Shame crosses his face. “No,” he whispers. “It’s inevitable.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“That remains to be seen. Examined in the light of day it’s incomprehensible to me that I was driven to attempt stripping the flesh from my own body in order to see if I was still myself underneath. I fear what I may be capable of in such a state.”

“I won’t let you hurt yourself again, Coop.”

“I know.”

There’s so much certainty and trust in just those two words, and that scares Harry because now he’s not sure he’ll be able to keep that promise. He doesn’t want to let Dale down.

“When Albert gets here to rip you to pieces, we should go to the station for that instead of letting him come here.”

“Alright, but why?”

“Because I don’t want him here.”

“Why, Harry?”

“So that… whenever you get scared again and can’t help it, you’re not thinking about Albert being here. I want it to feel as safe as possible here for you until you’re better.”

“That’s very considerate of you, Harry. Thank you.”

“When we do that I’ll tell everyone to leave you alone while we’re there if you want.”

“That might be for the best,” Dale agrees. “Although I suspect this information may interest Hawk. He knows more about the Black Lodge than the rest of us.”

Harry nods. “I’ll talk to him about it first and see what he says.” A thought randomly jumps into his brain. “Coop, what were you doing in the hotel room before I showed up?”

Dale immediately breaks eye contact and actually turns his whole head away so that Harry can’t see most of his face. “It would be in both our best interests for me to not answer that question, Harry.”

Well that’s… worrying. “Okay.”

Dale fidgets and the tremors come back, just enough to be visible but not so much that his whole body shakes. Harry kind of wishes there was someone around to slap him for this, because it looks like he managed to say exactly the wrong thing.

“Harry.”

“Yeah, Coop.”

“I’m going to request that you abstain from reading the rest of my notes. They contain something I do not wish for you to see.”

“You don’t have to ask me twice. Those things were scaring the hell out of me anyway.”

“Did you suffer disturbing dreams?”

“A little. I slept okay last night, but the night before wasn’t so great,” Harry admits. “Coop, I was real scared for awhile what would happen when you woke up. I thought maybe you’d still be seeing things or that you might try to hurt yourself again.”

“It’s a well-documented fact that sleep deprivation can lead to temporary insanity.”

“Oh.”

Dale’s shivering a little harder, now. “Harry.”

“Yeah?”

“Harry,” he repeats, staring down at his own hands.

“What, Coop?”

“I don’t believe I was meant to escape from the Black Lodge. My presence is unnatural.”

“No it’s not,” Harry tries to reassure him. “Can you imagine how we’d all feel if you just vanished and never came back? Everyone wanted you back, Coop. We all want you here with us.”

“I feel subtly out of place,” Dale murmurs in a shaking voice. “I wasn’t supposed to escape. They intended for me to become trapped.”

Harry, slow as always, only now gets that this is what Dale was talking about earlier - he’s having a fit of some kind, he’s stuck mentally and is just getting himself more scared because he can’t help it.

“Dale, you look at me,” he orders. He’s soft about it, though, and waits until it happens. “I don’t want you to be trapped there. I don’t care if it seems wrong or anything, I want you to be here in the real world sitting in my kitchen and drinking coffee like you’re doing. Okay?”

Dale lets out a loud, shuddering breath, but nods. “Okay, Harry.”

“Good.” He gets up and heads for the pot, limping on his recently punctured foot. “How about a refill?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Cooper has a panic attack.  
> 2\. There are brief discussions of Cooper's prior dissociative episode and the resulting self-harm.


	4. Involuntary Confrontation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to the quarantine, I will now be posting updates to this fic twice a week: Mondays and Fridays.
> 
> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

“I don’t want to see Albert.”

“I know. Neither do I.”

“Harry.”

“Yeah, Coop.”

“Harry, I _really_ don’t wish to speak with Albert about this.”

Harry nods. “I tried to stop him, believe me. But if we don’t go to the station and talk to him he’ll probably just come here and that’d be even worse.”

It’s been thirty six hours since Dale’s deathlike sleep ended and already Harry’s mastered this routine. Dale will freak out about things, but quietly, not the way most people freak out. He’ll start trembling and either stare at Harry or look anywhere _but_ at Harry, there’s no in-between. He says the same words over and over. All Harry can really do is agree with whatever comes out of his mouth because Albert said not to provoke him. Dale is the most sensible, logical man Harry’s ever met, but when this happens (which so far is pretty damn often) logic and sense no longer matter. It’s frustrating.

Albert also said not to even touch Dale, but that’s not happening. Harry doesn’t really know any other way to comfort him, and a hand on his shoulder or back sometimes cuts his fear down by half. He’ll lean into Harry’s palm like a cat, and whenever words fail Harry’s always seen this get results.

So he does it now. He sits on the couch and puts his hand on Dale’s upper back, and almost immediately the fingers struggling to tie the shoelaces stop trembling. Dale breathes a little more normally (that usually takes longer to even out, though). Harry rubs his palm along Dale’s shoulder blade a little and wonders how long it’ll be before his friend can get back to normal… weeks, maybe? The calendar on his fridge seems like there are more days on it than before. He feels incredibly guilty the second he has that thought and tries to convince himself that it’s not because this version of Dale is already emotionally draining for him, but because he wants Dale to stop suffering as soon as possible. Which is even true - he does want Dale to stop suffering, after all.

It’s just that Harry didn’t know what he was getting into when he went to the hotel a few days ago. He wasn’t prepared for Dale to have gone crazy, because that idea until now was so unthinkable that it never even occurred to him. He figured maybe… Harry’s dad got shot in 1944 somewhere over in Europe and was sent home, and sometimes would have nightmares about it or think he was somewhere else, another place and time than Twin Peaks in 1952 when Harry was six and his memories started to be formed reliably. He figured maybe Dale might be like that, or something. But this is a whole other animal that Harry’s never seen before and he’s at a complete loss.

“Harry.”

“Yeah?” He pretends not to be startled. He’s not sure when he got lost in his own thoughts.

“You’re thinking very loudly.”

Oh, right. Dale just does this sometimes, now. He knows everything that goes on in Harry’s head without Harry saying a word. This is new, and it’s a problem. Harry can’t keep his guilt to himself.

“I’m sorry, Coop.”

“It’s alright. I don’t enjoy my current state any more than you do and I’d like it to resolve itself as quickly as possible.”

Harry nods. “Yeah, I guess you do, huh?” He stands up off the couch. “Alright, we gotta go get hassled by Albert. I’ll do what I can to keep him from trapping you there for too long.”

It’s weird for him to be driving to the station out of his work uniform, but for one thing it’s Saturday and for another he already took time off work just for Dale so he wouldn’t be coming here in anything but jeans and a plaid shirt to begin with. At least almost everyone will be out of the station today. It’ll be him, Dale, Albert, and possibly Hawk. Hawk’s smart enough to leave Dale alone without being told, so Harry’s not worried about much aside from Albert’s complete lack of social skills. He has a really bad feeling that he’s about to watch Dale get tortured.

“I’ll turn the notes over to Hawk,” Dale decides from the passenger seat. “He may be able to interpret the majority of the information contained there amid my psychosis.”

“There’s information there?” Harry asks, completely seriously. He thought it was all craziness put on paper.

“Yes, there is. Pieces of information, to be more precise. It goes without saying that I was far from in my right mind when I recorded those notes and currently I don’t recall which pieces I buried in them.”

“Fair enough.”

On arrival, it turns out that Hawk’s definitely there because they run into him first. He greets them with nods: “Harry. Cooper.”

“Hawk.” Dale reaches into the cargo pocket on his left leg and pulls out the sheets from his notepad, now folded in half. “If you’d be kind enough to look these over and determine which parts are relevant, it would be extremely helpful. Please know going in that this will likely be difficult to achieve, and also that there is one page you’ll discover at some point which I would prefer never to see the light of day. You’ll know it when you see it. I’d like it destroyed and never spoken of.”

“Coop, if it’s that bad, why didn’t you just do that yourself?” Harry interrupts.

“The idea of looking at these is much too frightening,” Dale admits. “It’s enough of a reminder of my temporarily incapacitated state that I recall some of those episodes in my nightmares.”

Which is completely fair, so Harry doesn’t say anything and instead braces himself as they walk into the conference room. Albert’s watching them both the way he always watches things, seeing everything kind of like how Dale also sees everything but with none of the warmth or feeling. Albert’s cold and extremely calculated, only watching because he needs to for his job. Dale watches simply because he likes to watch and it makes him happy. Harry doesn’t think Albert will ever be happy about anything.

“Coop, I’d like to start these proceedings by being painfully honest with you.” Of course that’s the first thing Albert says. Harry braces himself and can almost feel Dale doing the same thing beside him. “I can pretty much guarantee that what’s about to happen will cause some number of panic attacks for you.”

“Y’know you could try being nice to him,” Harry snaps. He already hates this and he doesn’t want Albert making Dale’s life any harder than it needs to be.

A finger gets pointed at him. “If you can’t keep your inept opinions to yourself you need to leave, Truman.”

“Harry. Albert. Please stop this,” Dale says. “I’d like to get things over with as quickly as possible and you two arguing is counterproductive and detrimental to that goal at best.”

Albert shoots Harry one last indignant glare before getting back to business. “You’d probably be best sitting down, Coop. It’s not going to be quick.” They both park themselves at the conference table across from Albert, who now looks at Harry again. “You mentioned that he wrote down some things.”

“Yeah, but Hawk has those right now so you should talk to him about it.”

“Of course he does,” Albert mutters, rolling his eyes. “God forbid you stop blundering around for two seconds and actually do something helpful.”

“Albert, I gave Hawk my notes,” Dale butts in. “He’s the most knowledgeable of us on this topic and it seemed practical to turn them over to him for examination. I’m sure if you manage to reign in your arrogance he’ll be more than happy to cooperate with you.”

Albert frowns. “You should’ve given them to me first.”

“Yes, that may be true. However the fact remains that I didn’t. Please learn to live with it.”

As much as it bothers Harry that Dale’s doing so bad right now, he can’t help that he has to bite the insides of both cheeks to keep himself from grinning because watching Dale be viciously not in the mood for Albert’s bullshit is the best thing he’s seen all week.

“Don’t get pissy, Coop. I’m here to help whether your knuckle-dragging sheriff thinks so or not.”

“Albert-” Harry starts to shout, standing up for his chair and jabbing a finger. He’s stopped by Dale’s arm across his chest, pushing backwards ever so slightly.

“Harry. Please.”

Harry works up his best, most impatient glower just for Albert as he sits back down. He doesn’t care if Albert won’t try to hit back, if this keeps up he knows he’ll end up clocking the bastard again and this time he won’t feel bad about it.

“Right,” Albert grunts, eyeing Harry a little before looking back at Dale. “Coop, this is hard and shitty and please believe me when I say that contrary to popular belief I’m not unsympathetic… but you have to start by describing to me exactly what happened when you entered the hell-hole.”

Dale’s immediately shivering like he just got done standing in a blizzard in his underwear and he shakes his head so hard Harry worries he’ll give himself whiplash. “No. No. Albert I can’t do that.”

“Then give me your notes.”

Dale closes his eyes. “No. I can’t do that either.” All the color is coming out of his knuckles from how hard he’s grabbing onto the edge of the table. “There’s a page which needs to be expunged prior to your viewing.”

“Really. Why’s that?”

“Albert quite frankly it’s because I can’t trust you to keep it to yourself if you read it.”

“Interesting.” Albert frowns, but at least this time it seems thoughtful instead of irritated. “Well, Coop, that puts us at a little bit of an impasse, don’t you think?”

“I at no point agreed to this meeting.”

Harry puts his hand on Dale’s shoulder and ignores the look he gets for it. “Coop, maybe you can just describe a few things first,” he suggests. “Focus on some specifics instead of trying to say everything all at once. Just… start with something easy.”

It takes a second, but Dale nods agreeably. He’s not trembling as much anymore but Harry doesn’t let go of him.

What he gives them is the waiting room, an endless sit in virtual silence where even the coffee is wrong. Dale doesn’t release the table edge until he stops speaking. Albert writes everything down and Harry does nothing, sitting still with his hand on Dale’s shoulder while trying to figure out how even the coffee could be wrong there. But in a terrible way it makes sense. Dale’s favorite thing in the world is coffee.

“Harry, coffee isn’t my favorite thing,” Dale informs him suddenly. “It’s high on the list, but it’s not my favorite.”

Harry snorts at Albert’s surprised look and decides to explain even though he has no reason to be nice to the cranky son of a bitch right now. “Turns out whatever happened in there made his mental… everythings get a lot stronger. It’s been throwing me for a loop since he woke up from that two-day nap.”

“Okay, we’ll definitely have to talk about that later on,” Albert decides, scribbling another note in his pad of paper. “So what happened after the first room?”

This sets Dale off again and he presses himself further into Harry’s touch like he thinks that can save him. Harry really hates that it doesn’t work that way. He’d love nothing more than to save Dale from all of this. Instead Dale is still forced to sit here and painfully explain aspects of a living nightmare to Albert… who doesn’t seem to realize that he’s not only speaking with a human being, but a friend and colleague. Instead Albert stays clinical, abrasive, like he’s dissecting a corpse with a scalpel and not tormenting a living person.

It goes on like this for a little while, “good-cop-bad-cop”ing Dale into talking with Albert being a shit and Harry doing his damnedest to reassure his friend. Eventually Dale’s voice cracks in the middle of a sentence and he won’t say another word, he just sits there wracked with tremors and his hands balled into fists on the table. He refuses to look at either of them.

Harry makes an executive decision. “I think we should take a break.” He doesn’t give Albert space to argue, standing up from his chair and pulling Dale along after him.

There’s not a lot of safe spots in the station that won’t remind Dale of something horrible surrounding the Laura Palmer case or the Black Lodge, so Harry’s more or less forced to take him into the bathroom. They make it three steps past the door and then Dale collapses to the grimy linoleum, pulling Harry down after him with his dead weight. Harry lets him curl into a ball first and then hugs him, as tight as possible but careful of his hurt arm. Dale’s shaking is so bad it could probably rattle Harry’s fillings right out of his teeth, so he hangs on as hard as he can because he doesn’t know what else to do. There’s no right words for this after Albert’s been dragging Dale for forty five minutes.

“I wasn’t supposed to escape,” Dale mumbles from where his face is buried in Harry’s shirt. “Harry.”

“Yeah?”

“Harry.”

“Go ahead, Coop.”

“Harry, I wasn’t supposed to escape. It’s unnatural. I should still be trapped in the non-reality.”

“I don’t care, I’d rather have you here,” Harry says for probably the tenth time in two days. For some reason Dale keeps getting stuck on this one thing. “Dale, listen to me. I want you to be here instead. I don’t care about ‘supposed to’s and ‘should be’s. I want you here where you belong in the real world.”

Dale lets go of himself and now clings to Harry instead the way a child would. Harry takes it in stride as much as he can. Dale’s really sick and needs help, that’s all there is to it. So Harry sits on a floor they should’ve mopped more thoroughly and hugs his friend until long after his legs have gone numb. He wishes he knew how to fix this.

Finally, Dale stirs, but it’s not to move. Instead he starts talking.

“Harry, are you familiar with the song ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?”

“What?”

“A song, Harry. It was released in 1975 by the band Queen. I was sixteen at the time.”

“Uh… maybe. I’m not great at remembering the names of songs, Coop.”

“One of the verses is ‘sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all.’ Until recently it never occurred to me what the sentiment behind this statement can be. I don’t believe the songwriter meant it in a literal sense and was simply trying to create memorable art. But in this moment I can comprehend that sentiment due to the extreme disturbances to my psychological state of being and to my life in general.”

It takes Harry a few seconds to cut through the babbling and get at what Dale actually means by that. He feels like an icicle just got shot into his spine.

“Coop… don’t say shit like that. We’ll figure out how to fix you and get everything back to normal again.” Harry doesn’t know what to do with all this fear that’s crowding into his brain suddenly. He doesn’t even know why hearing this makes him scared, but it does. An idea tugs the corner of his mind, letting him know that something about this (besides the obvious) is extremely, incredibly wrong. But he’s not sure what. The little nagging idea won’t tell him. “It’s gonna be okay, Coop. You don’t have to wish for things like that.”

Dale starts to tremble in his arms again. “I can’t speak to Albert anymore today.”

Harry nods. “Okay. I’ll tell him that and we’ll go home,” he promises.

Dale finally raises his face again - he’s so exhausted, which makes sense but also doesn’t at the same time. He was awake for weeks and then he slept for days. Harry knows for a fact Dale slept last night, too, because he sat up through most of it watching from the doorway like before. Eventually Dale woke up and asked Harry to please stop staring at him, so Harry did for about ten minutes and when he came back Dale was sleeping again. After that Harry went to sleep himself on the couch.

They get up off the floor and leave the bathroom, which finds Albert standing in the hall waiting for them.

“Truman if you say what I think you’re about to say know that if he doesn’t talk to me there will be involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in Coop’s immediate future,” Albert threatens.

“Does it work that way? Can he do that?” Harry asks, looking at Dale.

“No, he can’t, but Gordon can,” Dale answers quietly.

“Albert why are you torturing him?” Harry demands, stepping forward to stand between the two agents so that maybe Dale will feel more safe.

“Sheriff what you should be asking instead is what will happen to him if we don’t get this unpacked and taken care of immediately. If you’ve ever broken a bone you’ll know that you go straight to the emergency room to get it set and put in a cast. If you sit and wait for weeks it heals crooked, and painful, and then you go to the hospital like you should’ve done in the first place and they have to re-break the bone so it can heal correctly this time. Now I want you to imagine it’s Cooper’s brain and not a bone. And it’s also a hundred times worse than having to re-break that bone.”

“You could be less of an asshole about it,” Harry snaps, jabbing a fingertip into Albert’s chest.

“I’m doing my job,” Albert grunts, swatting his hand away.

“Find a better way to do it, then!”

“You, like most people, seem to operate under the misnomer that I enjoy undertaking tasks of this nature.”

Harry doesn’t really know what to say to that. It never occurred to him that Albert hates this, too.

“Albert if you’ll at least allow me a brief period to recuperate,” Dale finally speaks up in a shaking voice, still behind Harry. “This is extremely taxing.”

“You just spent the last twenty seven minutes hiding in the bathroom.”

Harry uses both palms to shove Albert backwards several steps. “You have no right to bitch. You’re not the one who had to go through all that that’s happened to him, so you’re gonna go sit in the conference room and wait until he’s ready again.”

Albert looks like he’s seriously reconsidering his policy of militant pacifism, but after a few seconds seems to realize that would be a terrible idea and goes back to the conference room like Harry told him to do. Harry, meanwhile, puts a hand on Dale’s back and they retreat to his office after getting some coffee.

“How long do you suppose I’ll be able to sit here until he realizes I’m not coming back?” Dale wonders before taking a sip.

“Gordon can’t really send you to an insane asylum, can he?”

“Given the correct set of circumstances, yes, he can. Unfortunately for me virtually all the criteria have been effectively met. It would be safe to say confessing everything to Albert is my only chance to avoid being institutionalized.” Dale’s hands start to shake and he immediately puts his mug on Harry’s desk.

“I’ll try to make him be nicer to you,” Harry says. He has no idea how else he should answer that. “Coop, I really hate saying this, but… Albert might actually be right. This seems like the kinda thing we shouldn’t just let sit. He could stand to be less of a bastard, but he’s not stupid. I’ll do whatever I can to get him to be less of a shit and maybe that’ll help everything.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’ll refrain from belting him a second time, Harry.”

Harry’s not expecting that, and he almost laughs but manages not to. Nothing about this situation is funny. “I’ll do my best, but if he’s really asking for it I might have to.”

Dale’s eyes are sad in a way Harry’s never seen before, and that scares him. “I’m sorry I’m like this, now.”

Harry shakes his head. “Why? When the hell did you ever ask for this? Drink your coffee, Dale. Stop being sorry. Stop wishing you were never born while you’re at it.”

“I’ll rephrase… I’m sorry that my current state causes you such distress,” Dale amends.

“There’s lots of other things that cause me distress and they never apologize for it. Coop. Don’t do this, okay? Don’t start blaming yourself for any of this. It’s not helping you and it’s scaring me.”

That’s the wrong thing. As soon as Harry says that, he knows it’s the wrong thing, it’s making it about him even though it’s not supposed to be.

“Do you understand, then?” Dale asks quietly. “That’s why I’m apologizing. For the past several days I’ve achieved nothing besides frightening you and causing you unreasonable emotional strain.”

Harry needs to be smacked for this. Nothing he’s done so far has been right, all he keeps doing is making things worse. He doesn’t know what to do. He can’t figure out what will help, what will get Dale back to normal.

He pushes the coffee back towards Dale. “Coop… how can I make this better for you? You gotta tell me, I can’t figure it out on my own.”

Dale’s trembling hands wrap around the mug but don’t lift it, the tremors are too strong. “I’m not confident I’ll be able to convince you of this, but knowing that you care enough to be upset by my current state is helpful on its own.”

“Of course I care, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes, Harry, we are.”

Dale manages a weak smile, the first one Harry’s seen since he entered the Black Lodge. It’s not a nice expression, though - underneath that smile Dale looks like he could cry, like maybe he should be crying but he’s too stubborn to do it. Harry’s in pain seeing that.

“Coop…” he starts, then completely forgets what he was about to say. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. To buy himself some time he leans across his desk and puts his hands over Dale’s, pressing them into the coffee mug a little. “I’m gonna talk to Albert again and see if we can’t come back to this tomorrow. I want you to drink this. It’ll be okay.”

Harry has a really bad feeling that he’s lying when he says that, and from the look he gets he’s pretty sure Dale knows it, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Cooper has multiple panic attacks throughout the chapter.  
> 2\. Cooper perseverates on the idea that he was never meant to escape from the Black Lodge.  
> 3\. Cooper briefly expresses the sentiment that he almost wishes he didn't exist, which scares Harry.  
> 4\. Albert threatens Cooper with involuntary admission to a psychiatric institution if he won't cooperate.


	5. Unreasonable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi can I get some comments please.
> 
> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

The words Albert used keep him up for awhile: clinical depression, severe psychological trauma, general anxiety not-otherwise-specified. Harry doesn’t even know what the last one is supposed to be. He lies on the couch and looks at his living room ceiling, listening to the rain hitting his roof. One of the hardest things about this is understanding that for all his personal faults, Albert knows what he’s talking about.

Harry rolls around on the couch some more. It comes to him that sleeping on the couch to begin with probably isn’t helping, but Dale’s in his bed so his other option right now would be the floor. He puts his arm over his eyes and hangs one leg off the side. Nothing helps. The springs in the couch are hurting his back after however many nights now and he’s thinking too hard to relax anyway. Something’s really wrong and he doesn’t know what it is… all he’s figured out so far is that it’s not something obvious. There are plenty of obvious things wrong, but whatever this one is, it’s not something he can see.

In the end, he doesn’t actually go to sleep, because as he’s finally starting to drift off the quiet around him is broken by what sounds suspiciously like Dale falling out of bed. Harry’s eyes open again and when he stands up he can just barely read on the clock that it’s 2:30. Great. Looking into his bedroom, Dale’s nowhere to be seen, so Harry goes in. He finds his friend on the floor on the other side of the bed, shaking and curled in on himself.

“Coop, you okay?”

What a stupid question. Of course Dale’s not okay.

“Troubling dreams,” Dale answers, muffled in the sleeves of his pajamas.

“Okay.” Harry just stands there like an idiot. He doesn’t know how to fix that. He doesn’t know how to fix anything. He happens to rest his palm on the bed and discovers that the sheets, pillow and blanket are soaked through with sweat. “Uh. Here, I’ll change all this for you if you want to go put on something dry.”

Dale disappears and Harry starts stripping the bed. He’s not sure what this means, but he knows it’s bad. The only time he’s heard about Dale having a hard time sleeping was when a group of Icelanders were staying at the hotel, so he knows this isn’t normal. Harry balls up the sheets and tosses them somewhere. He doesn’t care where they go right now. A pillowcase, two medium-weight blankets. He throws them in vaguely the same direction as the sheets. Harry digs up fresh bedding out of his closet and doesn’t bother making it look pretty as he redoes the mattress. As he’s stuffing the pillow into its case he realizes he’s had time to make the entire bed and Dale isn’t back.

Harry finds him in the bathroom, sitting on the lid of the toilet with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He’s down to his undershirt and boxers, but Harry can tell those are the still the damp sweaty ones. This in no way makes him less worried.

“Coop, you wanna tell me what’s going on here?”

“Not particularly.” Dale shifts, putting his fingers through his dark hair and messing it up even more than it already was. “Harry, it would be best for you if you left me to my own devices for a moment please.”

“Coop, you know I can’t do that,” Harry argues quietly. “I’m not interested in what’s best for me right now, I have to make sure you’re… as okay as possible, considering everything.” Albert told him on no uncertain terms to make sure Dale can’t hurt himself, and that Dale asking to be alone is a huge red flag. That was this afternoon - well, yesterday afternoon now. He wasn’t expecting to see this so soon. “I’ll just… uh, I’ll just stand outside the door here so you can get dressed.”

Looking, he notices what probably set Dale off: these pajamas are the ones with bloodstains all over the left sleeve. Harry steps into the bathroom without another word and picks them up to get rid of them. Dale has three sets of pajamas total, and Harry can’t find the third one, so he gives up and brings Dale a flannel and a pair of sweatpants from his own dresser. He turns away long enough for Dale to put on fresh underwear. Harry’s clothes are a little baggy and loose on him; the bandage is still visible through the gap at the end of the sleeve.

Dale watches the floor while doing up the buttons. Nobody else could make such a basic and easy thing as fastening a shirt look so hopeless and uncertain as Dale does right now. Even after hearing it all laid out and explained in the conference room earlier, Harry’s still staggered by the level of brutality and horror that got his friend to this state.

They go sit in the kitchen and one of the notes Harry read runs through his mind, the simplest but ugliest one he saw out of them: _please someone help me._ It’s written all over Dale now, in his face and how he moves. Harry wishes as hard as he can that that someone is him, but it really looks like he’s the wrong man for the job. Nobody ever taught him how to deal with anything like this.

“I’ve become so hobbled that I can no longer stand to wear my own clothes,” Dale comments.

“It’s okay, Coop. I’ve got plenty of shirts.”

“Harry that’s not the point. It’s ridiculous and unacceptable that something so trivial as a mark on some fabric stops me in my tracks.” Dale’s voice is sharp and frustrated, now. He reaches under his sleeve to pick the edge of the bandage but Harry stops him with a hand on his wrist. “In a logical sense there’s no conceivable reason why something like this should be so outrageously difficult.”

“Coop, listen… I know you’re… different from most of us. You see stuff nobody else sees, you get visions sometimes, all that kinda thing. After everything you said to Albert today, if I had to go into that place I would’ve broke, too. So would Albert, so would Hawk, so would anyone. And maybe you being different made that even worse somehow. Because you had to see all those other shitty things first before going and walking right into hell. And from the sound of it, everything in there was designed to break you from the start.”

Dale seems to shrink; his expression is desperately sad and his eyes scream for help. “I regret that I wasn’t strong enough to keep it from breaking me.”

There are no words for this. If they exist, Harry can’t think of them. He stands up from the table and pulls Dale after him for a hug. Because maybe that’s the right thing. But there’s no right thing for what happened to Dale, for what’s _still_ happening to Dale. But maybe this is a little less wrong than anything else.

The words Harry eventually finds are still probably not the right thing, but they’re all he can come up with. “Coop, before you went there you got shot and you were taken hostage, you had to clean up after Windom Earle… you held a man in your arms and watched him die. Nobody should have to do any one of those things by themselves. You keep saying that the way you’re being right now is unreasonable, but everything you went through’s unreasonable anyway.”

Dale nods into his shoulder. Harry squeezes his friend a little and figures he should stop talking now… it’s not like Dale can’t hear him thinking. After a minute he leads Dale back to his bedroom by the shoulder. Harry waits for Dale to lie down, then sits against the headboard on the other side of the bed. He has a gut feeling that if he looks away for too long Dale will try to do something uncharacteristically stupid. But Harry’s also not completely sure what that something might be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Brief mention of self-harm.


	6. Put Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An hour and a half early. Oh well.
> 
> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

“Coop, allow me to make an unbiased observation,” is what Albert decides to start with. Harry already knows that what follows will be something horrible.

“Yes, Albert?”

“You require some level of psychiatric care and possibly medication to recover from this ordeal and I can’t in good conscience sign off that you should be allowed to return to work.”

Dale sits in silence for a moment, then nods slowly. “Yes, I was expecting this outcome.”

“I’m sorry, Coop.” To Albert’s credit, he actually does look like he is. “The fact is you’re in serious trouble and you’re no longer fit to continue in your position. You’ll receive your pension for service to the Bureau and the pay for your unused vacation time will be factored into your final paycheck.”

Dale still nods. “I’m unsurprised that this is the conclusion you’ve drawn… I wasn’t confident that I would be able to return to the Bureau even if you’d decided otherwise.”

He’s so quiet, but there’s no hiding the heartbreak in his voice. Harry’s never seen Dale admit defeat before, but he’s pretty sure that’s what this is. He seems to be losing everything right now - his self-confidence, his courage, his ability to think clearly when under stress. Now he’s lost his job, too, and from the look on his face probably his entire reason for being. Just when Harry didn’t think he could be more scared for his friend.

“Albert can you give us a minute?” Harry asks.

Albert, for once, doesn’t put up a fight and just leaves. He closes the door to the conference room behind him. The last time Harry saw this look on someone’s face, it was - very disturbingly - worn by Leland when Harry told him that Laura was dead. It’s the look of a man who’s taking in the worst thing that can happen to him and doesn’t know how he can possibly move forward with his life anymore. For a very long time Dale’s never had any existence outside his job, so he’s got nothing to go back to without it. He’d have to rebuild everything for himself from the ground up and Harry knows for a fact he’s not capable of that right now.

“Coop, there’s nobody in the station except for Albert,” he says, because he knows Dale knows none of these rooms are soundproofed.

“Yes, I’m aware…” Dale mumbles.

Harry stands Dale up from the chair and hugs him as tight as he can. The second he does Dale is sobbing into his neck. Fingers curl into his shirt so hard that he ends up with a small hole over his left shoulder blade. Harry just stands there, keeping Dale wrapped between his arms and his chest like somehow he can protect his friend from this terrible reality. But like always these days, this is the wrong thing and there’s nothing he can do to help. He hates that so much. It’s dragging him down by the neck, ever since he was a kid all he wanted to do was help and it drove him to public service and law enforcement. It’s his job to look after and take care of an entire town, but he can’t even look after and take care of one guy.

Dale stops making noise after just a few minutes and for awhile he stays where he is, trembling and crying silently against the spot where Harry’s neck becomes his shoulder. Harry doesn’t move either except to brush down the hair on the back of Dale’s head and then to rub a palm in circles across his back. Dale’s still losing weight… Harry’s almost positive he can feel ribs even though he’s not pressing that hard. Dale’s crazy metabolism is clearly working against him by this point. No wonder he was always cramming pastries down his throat before.

Harry doesn’t read minds like Dale does, but Dale’s thinking so loud right now even Harry can practically hear it. He says what he knows is in Dale’s head.

“It’s not fair.”

Dale’s head shakes against his wet shirt collar. “No, it isn’t.” His tremors get stronger for a few seconds, but then go back to the normal level of shakiness. “I’ve long since ceased to expect fairness out of life, so its cruelty no longer takes me by surprise… but I foolishly hoped for a more positive outcome.”

“Coop, y’know, you were looking at buying a place here anyway. Were you still gonna be an FBI agent?”

“It’s possible to live far away from my job. I had planned to discuss it with Gordon… Harry, I was never meant to come out of the Black Lodge.”

“You keep saying that and I’m gonna keep not caring if you were supposed to come out of there or not,” Harry tries to reassure him. “I didn’t sit on a log out in the cold for two days just for you to get stuck there, Coop. I’m glad you’re here. I want you here.”

“Your consistent thoughts on how difficult it is for you to be around me beg to differ,” Dale says in a tone that manages to be accusatory even though he clearly doesn’t mean it to sound that way.

“Yeah… I don’t mean to think that, I just… I just don’t know what I’m doing, Coop.”

“Harry, you’ve gotten more right than you know.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“But you still don’t give up,” Dale points out quietly. “You’ve provided me shelter, occasionally clothing, first aid. Compassion.”

“I still screw up a lot.”

“You’re doing your best.”

“I want you to eat something, Coop. You had about two bites of breakfast before we came here and I can feel your ribs under your shirt.”

“The thought of eating fills me with a phantom nausea, Harry,” Dale confesses. “It’s partially why I consumed nothing but coffee for weeks on end at the hotel. Each time I attempt to eat, I feel ill.”

Harry remembers now that he made all that soup and then forgot to actually feed it to Dale. It’s sitting in his fridge… maybe it’s still good.

“What kind of soup?”

“Just chicken soup, it’s not anything special.”

Harry brings Dale to the bathroom so he can wash his face. While that happens, Harry also takes off his flannel so that it can dry a little. The collar of his undershirt clings to his skin and right now the thing Harry hates most in the world is cotton fabric, because it dries from the outside in and takes forever to do it.

They finally go back to the conference room, and Albert’s once again waiting for them. Harry hopes and prays that Albert won’t bring up Dale’s breakdown from a few minutes ago, because by now it’s pretty well established that Dale’s not okay and talking about him bursting into tears in the conference room would be tasteless and mean.

“Coop, you might as well know I’ll be here for a couple weeks to gather up all the intel on the Black Lodge and its related problems and mishaps. A lot of it has to start and end with you… it’s also worth noting that after your encounter with that place and its demons you seem to be suffering symptoms in an almost identical vein to Laura Palmer shortly prior to her death. This would be depression, inclinations to self-harm and suicidal ideation. All of that has to be written up as evidence.”

“Wait, suicidal what now?” Harry asks. Apparently when he stepped out of the room to get coffee he missed a pretty vital part of the conversation yesterday.

“Albert I’m forced to ask if it would simply have been too difficult for you to keep that to yourself,” Dale demands, glaring at Albert. It’s pretty obvious that he’s also really deliberately avoiding looking at Harry.

“Coop, what’s he talking about?” Harry puts a hand on Dale’s shoulder.

“Even prior to my fears of being released from my profession being confirmed, I’ve been enveloped in a disinclination to persist in my current condition. I’m unable to stop questioning reality. I suffer almost constant panic attacks. You’re aware of those things… and of my previous temporary spell of psychosis. I’m unable to correct the situation and will thus be stuck in the aforementioned condition,” Dale confesses in a whisper. “This ultimately gives way to a growing desire to simply not exist at all.”

Harry’s not sure how, but he holds himself back from throwing up all over the table when he hears that. A cold sickness starts behind his sternum and spreads all across the back of his ribs. Way too many things about the way Dale’s been acting have suddenly started to make sense to him, and he doesn’t know how to handle the onslaught of realizations.

“Albert… I’m forced to ask if it would simply have been _too difficult_ for you to keep that to yourself,” Dale repeats.

“Are you suggesting that he’s too stupid to figure it out on his own eventually?” Albert replies, shrugging. “I know _I_ certainly thought so, but I was also under the impression that you had a higher opinion of his mental capacity than I do.”

“Albert, this isn’t funny.”

“Do you see me laughing? I don’t enjoy this, Coop. I don’t enjoy sitting here and watching you be miserable, and I definitely don’t enjoy having to be the one to tell you that your life has been effectively ruined. The entire flight up here I sat and begged a god I don’t even believe in to let me be wrong just this one time, to let it be a giant misunderstanding somehow and that I wouldn’t have to tell Gordon Cole to fire one of the best agents in the Bureau. Now. Tomorrow is Monday. I booked a doctor’s appointment for you but after that you can go back to the relatively capable care of your cowboy sheriff here, assuming he comes out of shock by then.”

Albert looks at Harry but Harry turns away to stare at the wall. He’s still stuck on the fact that Dale’s suffering enough that he wants to die - Harry wasn’t expecting that, somehow. He probably should’ve though. He can never put the pieces together when it really counts, it seems like.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Cooper learns he's no longer fit for service with the FBI and has a mental breakdown.  
> 2\. Harry learns that Cooper has suicidal ideation.  
> 3\. Cooper is becoming noticeably malnourished because his depression has stopped him from eating.


	7. The Honesty And Logic Of Psychosis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

Harry spends a few minutes with his head down on his desk. He hates himself so much just for thinking that he needed to have a break from Dale, but right now he gets to steal some time where nobody’s reading his thoughts as soon as he has them. Dale’s at Doc Hayward’s office getting looked over on Albert’s insistence this morning, and that means Harry gets to sit around at the station and be trapped in his own head. Even when Dale’s not present, Harry’s still consumed by him. Yesterday he discovered that one of his closest friends, who’s smart and kind and good at so many things and one of the best men he knows, is in enough pain to want to die. Every time Harry thinks he can’t get further out of his depth with Dale, something new and even more horrible comes up.

He’s starting to think that Dale will never be okay again. It’s been a week since Harry was sent to the hotel by Albert, and that week has lasted a god damn lifetime for him already. One of the scariest parts of this is actually something Albert said yesterday: that Dale now has the same mental problems Laura had before she succumbed to _Bob._ Harry doesn’t get how someone as rational and intelligent as Dale can be brought down to the same level as a hysterical teenager.

A knock on his office door.

“Yeah?” Harry calls, prying his head up from his desk and rubbing his face.

Hawk comes in without a word, closing the door behind him. He’s holding a paper that Harry instantly recognizes as one of Dale’s notes and the expression on his face is beyond disturbed. Great. God damn wonderful. Something new is about to get dropped into Harry’s lap, now, when there shouldn’t possibly be anything else left to shock him with anymore.

“This is the page Cooper wanted me to get rid of.”

“Then why haven’t you done that?” Harry demands. Whatever new level of hell that paper represents, he wants no part of it.

“Because you need to read it.”

Harry groans, but grudgingly accepts the notepad sheet. Hawk wouldn’t have brought this to him if it wasn’t really important and he knows it.

 _dear Harry_  
_presumably someone will discover this and turn it over to you. I can’t find a way to silence the screams all around me. my dreams as well as my waking moments are an endless torment. I was never meant to escape the Black Lodge and my current existence has devolved into a living hell. I can’t make it stop. it won’t stop on its own. I only ask that you not blame yourself or anyone else but me for my failings. tell Albert that he does not have permission to perform an autopsy. there are things I should’ve told you in person prior to this moment. I regret that I’ve run out of paper to do so now._ _  
love Dale_

Harry reads this three or four times before the denial leaves his brain. Dale’s suicidal… whatever that word was that Albert called it isn’t such a new thing after all, apparently. The date’s scrawled at the bottom and Harry realizes that this was probably written just before he showed up at the Great Northern and kicked Dale’s door in. What if he’d been five or ten or fifteen minutes later than he was?

Dale was getting ready to kill himself when Harry showed up.

Harry’s eyes snap away from the paper to his deputy’s face. “Hawk-”

“Go,” Hawk nods.

He jumps up from his desk and runs out of the station without saying a word to Lucy or even grabbing his hat, then races away without putting on his seatbelt. At least he remembers the sirens as he does double the speed limit up the road towards Doc Hayward’s outpatient office. Very deliberately, he starts to think only about how angry he is with no specifics, because he doesn’t want Dale to start giving him excuses or anything until he’s done talking about it. He also doesn’t need Albert to weigh in on this right now, who’s over there to supervise Dale’s appointment.

Harry goes into the waiting room and finds Albert scribbling things down.

“How long until he comes back?”

“Approximately ten to fifteen minutes… you look like someone just shot your dog right in front of you, Truman.”

“I’m not gonna talk about this with you until I’m good and ready,” Harry growls. He’s never in the mood for Albert’s shit anyway, but right now he may actually strangle the man to unconsciousness if pushed too far.

Dale emerges, holding some papers and already looking distressed even before his eyes find Harry. He doesn’t say a word, just gives his paperwork to Albert and follows Harry outside to the truck. Harry takes him home and they don’t talk at all on the drive. It ends up with them standing in the kitchen, about five feet away from each other.

As slowly and deliberately as possible, Harry takes the suicide note out of his pocket and holds it up.

Dale looks like he could pass out on the spot. “Harry-”

“You lied to me.”

“Harry-”

“You said you only started thinking shit like this the last few days or so.”

“I-”

“WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS FOR _ME,_ COOPER?!” Harry bellows. “What the hell made you put this on me?! You were gonna just slash your wrists in the hotel room or something and wait to get found, and with _this_ nearby, which means I woulda been the first one who got called! Then I’m the one who woulda showed up and seen you like that! Why did you do this?! WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST ASK FOR HELP?!”

Harry glares at him while he stands there, trembling and shaking his head. He hiccups and wipes his eyes on his sleeve. “Harry, I was out of my mind when I wrote that… I’m sorry…”

Harry crumples the page into a ball and throws it at him.

“You fucking should be, god dammit!” he yells. “Why isn’t it good enough for you that nobody else wants you to die?! Did you even think for a _second_ what this would do to me after-” Harry can barely see Dale anymore as he chokes on Josie’s name. “…after… Dale… I can’t…” A rough sob escapes from his throat even though he tries as hard as he can to keep it in. “Why would you do this to me?”

His throat closes after that and they both stay where they are and cry for a few minutes. Harry has no more words for this right now - he waits for Dale to explain himself.

“It seemed helpful at the time,” Dale finally says in a wavering voice. “I believed it would be significantly more distressing if you were left wondering.”

Harry shakes his head. “That wouldn’t have mattered that much.” He swallows too hard just to keep his voice and can’t take his bleary eyes off his own feet. “Coop… you don’t get it. You have no idea what this would’ve done to me. And after everything that happened in February and March… what do you think would’ve happened to everyone else around here? There’s not a lot of secrets in small towns. Everyone knows who you are and everyone would find out about this. It would just fuck everything up all over again.”

Dale’s breaths are short, shuddering and loud. “Harry. Please understand that there was no logic at work here. Lack of sleep-” He hiccups. “Lack of sleep leads to temporary psychosis. I didn’t ask for help because it never occurred to me that that was an option. That all aside…” He breathes heavily for a moment. “That all aside, I continue to suffer consequences from my entry to the Black Lodge. I no longer have my profession and my family members are either gone or estranged. I have no reason to exist.”

“You’ve got me… you could just stay here in Twin Peaks, we’ll find you a job or you can just come work for me again or something…”

“I’m mentally and emotionally taxing for you, Harry.”

“Just because something’s hard doesn’t mean I won’t still do it.” Harry wipes his face. “Or that I don’t wanna do it, either.” He shakes his head and finally looks at his friend. “Dale… don’t ever do this again, okay?”

“Unfortunately I can’t promise that… but I will still try to honor your request.”

At least he’s honest. Harry slowly crosses the floor and hugs him. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Coop. You just really scared me with this.”

“It’s alright, Harry. You were never supposed to see it.”

“I know… you scared Hawk, too. That’s why he gave it to me.”

Dale sinks further into Harry’s embrace. “There is a great well of fear and despair for me, now.”

“Yeah, I know there is. We just have to figure out a way to pull you back out of it again, that’s all.”

The tremors get worse and Dale is sniffing again, so Harry hugs him tighter.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” he whimpers. “I’m sorry I continually make life so difficult and complicated for you… you’re an excellent friend, and I love you very much, which seems to be to your detriment. It very often happens that the people I love suffer on my account.”

Harry takes a second to be startled because he doesn’t usually hear the word “love” used in this context, but then his mind is back on track. “Y’know maybe it would help your mental… everything if you’d stop blaming yourself for shit that’s not your fault, Coop. You did this after the whole thing with Audrey, too. I know you don’t like being like this and I know you didn’t ask for everything to turn out how it did, either. You just gotta stop letting it make bad decisions for you, that’s all. Like the whole ‘I’m never sleeping again’ thing. Don’t do that anymore. It just leads you to worse problems.”

He stops - Dale’s crying hard enough that Harry’s not sure he’s actually listening. So he stays there, rubbing his friend’s back. It’s still the wrong thing. Harry doesn’t think there ever will be a right thing, so he’ll just keep doing this until Dale tells him to stop. When there’s no right thing he’s going to do the thing that’s the least wrong, and that’s how this feels. It’s the least wrong thing for him to give Dale hugs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Harry discovers that Cooper wrote a suicide note addressed to him and that Cooper had previously intended to kill himself in his hotel room.  
> 2\. Harry and Cooper have a confrontation over the aforementioned note.


	8. Too Many Maybes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

“It seems inadvisable,” Dale comments.

“Noted,” Harry grunts before tossing back the double of whiskey he poured for himself. “I’m stressed out, Coop. I gotta get some sleep.”

“Alcohol inhibits REM sleep.”

“You need to get some sleep, too.”

“My dreams are terrifying.”

Harry shakes his head and sets down the glass, then puts his palm on Dale’s arm. “C’mere, we’ll do it together, then it won’t be so bad.”

He flips off all the lights on the way to the bedroom and refuses to feel weird about the fact that he’ll be sleeping next to another man. He’s doing this to help Dale feel safer, that’s all. They’re friends. There’s nothing that odd about this considering all the other odd things that have happened since their lives crashed together at the end of February.

Harry climbs into bed and settles, then the weight of the mattress shifts as Dale follows and lies down on the other side. It’s not that weird. Harry mostly pays attention to the burn of the liquor in his stomach, and once that goes away he listens to his friend’s quiet breathing. He hopes Dale can get some good sleep tonight, because maybe it’ll help everything else.

Probably the alcohol has something to do with it, but it doesn’t take Harry that long to fall asleep. He doesn’t stay asleep, though. His eyes open again in the middle of the night and immediately notices that the mattress is shaking, just a little bit. Rolling over, it’s Cooper shaking the mattress… he’s trembling, curled up into a ball on his side with his arms over his head and his back facing Harry. Harry reaches over to touch him and realizes this isn’t his normal tremors.

“Bad dreams?” Harry whispers, shuffling closer.

The silence he gets is an answer in and of itself. Harry sits up and carefully unfolds Dale, pulling him upright as well.

“I did my best not to wake you,” Dale mumbles.

“It’s okay.” Harry puts his hands on either side of Dale’s face and wipes away the tears with his thumbs. So far Harry understands that depression is a disease which makes people cry a lot and try to kill themselves. But he works now, so hard, not to be resentful anymore that this disease has his friend in its claws. “It’s okay.” It’s okay that Dale needs to cry this much, it’s okay that he couldn’t avoid being noticed for it. Harry pulls Dale in closer and just holds him for awhile. He’ll stay up like this all night if he has to, just to make Dale feel cared for. Maybe it’ll help.

Harry just wants to help.

He wants to make it so that Dale can be okay again, someday.

Maybe this can get things closer to that goal.

Too many maybes.

Harry sighs quietly, remembering a little too late that the inside of his head isn’t private anymore as he rests the side of his face in Dale’s hair. Dale sinks into him in turn, maybe to soak in all the heat he apparently throws off or something. It’s not that cold in here but Dale shivers a lot these days, so maybe that’s it.

“That’s not it, Harry.”

“Okay.”

“You’re solid and dependable. Those things are comforting.”

“For you?”

“For the majority of people… but in this instance, yes, for me as well.” Dale settles a little more against his chest. “You’re a good friend, Harry.”

“I do my best.” Dale is trembling again, but it’s the normal kind, the way he always shakes these days. Harry hugs him tighter. He’s not sure why Dale shivers so much and Albert didn’t explain it very well. “Are you sure you’re not cold, Coop?”

“I wouldn’t be anyway, you’re an entire furnace all by yourself, Harry.” Dale - somehow - nestles himself even deeper into Harry’s arms. “It’s a physiological response to psychological trauma.”

“Yeah.”

“The state of the mind often has a tremendous effect on the state of the body.”

“That why you’re still not eating?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Harry sighs through his nose, then lies back and pulls Dale after him so they’re still more or less wrapped together. He lets go with one hand just long enough to pull the blankets over them.

“Tomorrow, we’re gonna get you some donuts, and you’re not getting a single drop of coffee until you eat at least two of them.”

“I make no promises.”

“Coop, I’m serious, you’re gonna starve to death if this keeps up.”

“I’ll make an effort.”

“Good enough.”

Harry keeps holding him and doesn’t relax until he’s asleep again. He doesn’t sleep himself, or at least not for awhile. Instead he lies there, feeling Dale breathe. He tells himself that if he can just get Dale to eat breakfast tomorrow, things will start getting better.

Harry’s always been a bad liar… even to himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Brief allusions to Harry suffering from some form of alcoholism.  
> 2\. Cooper has a minor breakdown in the middle of the night.  
> 3\. Some mild internalized homophobia.


	9. Life Exists In Black Holes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

Harry debates as he looks at the plate… is it a good idea to try and cut jelly donuts in half? He knows that powdered-sugar jelly donuts and the ordinary donuts with chocolate frosting are Dale’s favorites, but how the hell do you cut a jelly donut in half without ruining it? In the end he goes for it and only makes a tiny mess instead of a big one, so he decides that’s a success and puts the knife back before bringing the plate into the conference room.

“Okay, Coop.” He sets it in front of Dale. “One half at a time. After this, coffee.”

Dale nods, looking like he already feels sick just at the idea of trying to eat two entire donuts. But after touching him last night Harry’s positive that his ribs are coming through his skin and that can’t stay the way it is.

Dale hesitates for a second before picking up one half of the jelly donut and taking a bite of it. Harry sits down next to him and waits patiently. Albert will be here soon, but he’s deliberately not thinking about that. Instead he thinks to himself that he also wants to eat a bunch of donuts - which, honestly, he does - since that might help Dale feel hungrier. Judging by the fact that Dale’s slowly devouring the first donut, it seems to be working at least a little, and that lightens Harry’s mood some which also probably helps.

Dale makes it to one and a quarter donuts.

“Harry, I’m beginning to feel ill.”

“Okay.” Harry nods. “You think you can finish that half?”

“Unfortunately, no. I may become violently sick.”

“You never promised, you just said you’d make an effort. This is the most I’ve seen you eat at once since you started staying with me, it’s a good start.” Harry picks up the untouched half of the second donut and takes a huge bite of it. “Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

Harry goes and gets two mugs of joe, and in the ten seconds it takes to do that Albert somehow materializes in the conference room without Harry even hearing him come in.

“So, anyone up for explaining to me what the hell happened yesterday morning?” is the first thing out of his mouth when Harry enters the room.

Harry was ready for this, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out the suicide note. “This.”

Albert unfolds it and reads for about five seconds before his eyes bounce up to Dale. “You do realize that you could’ve just shot him or something instead, right? It probably would’ve hurt less. And incidentally I’m not enough of an emotional masochist to perform an autopsy on you, Coop.”

“Albert,” Harry growls.

“I appreciate your position, Sheriff, but this is one of those things that we should generally consider to fall into the category of ‘unacceptable.’”

“Albert I was suffering extreme delusions and hallucinations when I penned that note,” Dale points out.

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t put it past you to pull something like this again.”

“Albert, enough,” Harry insists. He _will_ deck that bastard a second time if he has to.

“Harry if you hit him I’m going to be very upset with you,” Dale informs him.

Albert looks surprised for a brief second, then seems to remember. “Why am I getting knocked on my ass this time?”

“Because you’re a callous son of a bitch and I don’t like you,” Harry says bluntly. “What are we doing this morning besides you tearing into him for something I’ve already talked to him about?”

“You know your vocabulary’s a lot bigger than I thought, Truman.”

“Albert, do you like having all your teeth where they belong?” Harry threatens. He’s getting real sick of this real fast.

Albert glowers at him for a second. Then he looks at Dale again. “Coop, if you went on antidepressants you’d probably gain back all your weight in about a week and a half.”

“I’ve read the list of side effects you’ve provided me. Consider me extremely unimpressed.”

“You need to do something.” Albert shakes his head. “Sitting around being miserable here in Nowheresville is great and all but it’s not helping you, there needs to be an outside influence if you want to actually start improving.”

“Having heard my prior descriptions of the situation I put myself in, do you expect a high chance of recovery for me, Albert? Please be honest.”

Albert is quiet and looks away for a moment. “You’re in for a hard time.”

“That’s not encouraging.”

“People beat cancer, you can do this,” Albert huffs. “I didn’t say it’s impossible, did I?”

“It’s implied in your tone that you have little confidence in me being able to return to a state of normality. Additionally, I have a sense that you wouldn’t have told Gordon to remove me from my job if you thought I had a high chance of success.”

Dale’s hands are trembling and Harry watches him put down his mug of coffee. The destructive power of Albert’s missing social skills knows no bounds, apparently. Harry puts his arm around Dale’s shoulders. He wonders why touch is so important for people… it helps Dale, yeah, but it kinda makes him feel a little better each time, too. Dale leans into the contact like always. It almost seems like that’s what sustains him instead of food these days.

“High chance of success or no, you need to do something,” Albert insists. “And I’ve seen you accomplish much more difficult things before. When you got stabbed in Pittsburg that wound should’ve ended you. You were back to work in two months.”

“Albert you may not be aware of this, but I became extremely depressed following that event as well. It took me an unbearably long time to overcome that then, and it was after an incident that was much less disturbing and humiliating than this was.”

“But you did do it,” Albert points out. “Which shows that you can in the first place. Besides, last time you didn’t have someone around all the time to coddle you and make you eat sugary junk food.”

That’s the only thing Harry’s ever heard Albert say about him that seemed even remotely appreciative. “He won’t eat most things anymore, Albert.”

“I’m aware of that. Maybe try getting him out of your house for something other than coming here, it might help.”

“No,” Dale argues immediately. “No. I’m indescribably uncomfortable allowing the world at large witnessing me in my current state.”

Harry thinks. “We can go fishing or something, Coop. We’ll be away from everyone and it’s not stressful, you’ll get some fresh air.” As soon as he says it he remembers that Dale’s last fishing trip ended terribly. He swallows. “Uh. It doesn’t have to be a fishing trip, though.”

“A picnic,” Albert suggests.

Both of them watch Dale for a long time… Dale doesn’t look back at either of them. His sharp hazel eyes are on the wall to his right instead. But this choice should probably be his. Making him do things isn’t going to help.

Finally he nods, just slightly. “A picnic may be alright.” He looks down at his hands, bridging them on the table. “It reminds me of the beginning,” he murmurs, so quietly Harry almost doesn’t catch it. “Harry, what will this picnic entail?”

“Food,” Harry says stupidly. “Uh, it’s not about that, though. It’s more like an excuse to just be someplace else for awhile and be in nature.”

Dale nods a second time, slightly less nervously. “That sounds pleasant.”

“It usually is. I know a couple good spots we could go to for it… we can go tomorrow or Thursday, probably, as long as it’s not too busy in the morning.”

“Presumably weather-depending as well.”

“Yeah.”

Looking at him, Harry wishes he could find a smile again. He used to do it so much, and forget a room - Dale’s smile can light an entire building probably. It’s bright and warm like the sun, and it only makes him even more handsome and charming than he already would be. Without Dale’s smile, Harry’s starting to feel like they’re on the ninth day of living in a pitch black hole. Before the Lodge, talking about stomping around in the woods for a random and completely pointless picnic would probably get one of those huge, bright smiles.

Not anymore. Now, Dale just sits there quietly, looking a little more anxious than he already was. The circles under his eyes don’t help any, either.

“Harry, if you repeatedly leave the station at random and without warning on my account won’t it jeopardize your livelihood?” Dale questions.

“Coop, why can’t you just be selfish for once and not think about stuff like that?” Harry asks instead of answering, not stopping to think about it first. “We’re gonna go on a damn picnic and do all the things people do on picnics like sitting on a blanket and saying the clouds are shaped like rabbits or whatever.”

Albert snorts loudly when he says that. Harry ignores it.

“I don’t want you to lose your job because of me,” Dale tells him quietly.

“I won’t. It’s okay, Coop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Cooper is notably malnourished as far as Harry can tell.


	10. Run And Hide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had an annoying day today and I slept really bad last night so the chapter's going up early.
> 
> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

This seems like less and less of a good idea by the minute.

“How familiar are you with this location, Harry?”

“I’ve been coming here since I was a kid,” he tries to reassure Dale. “You won’t get lost, Coop, I promise. Just stick with me and nothing’ll happen.”

“There may be other pockets of non-reality like the Black Lodge,” Dale says. “It’s entirely possible those would exist somewhere in this vicinity.”

“No, there’s nothing here, I’ve been coming here a long time, Coop. Nothing’s gonna jump out of the ground and snatch you or anything.” He picks up the box of food and closes the door of his truck - he got a bunch of take-out from the Double R for this excursion. “We’ll only be walking for five or six minutes.”

Dale looks almost paralyzed and Harry realizes that bringing his friend out into the woods was a really stupid thing to do. The woods are where all of Dale’s problems came from.

“There could be something here,” Dale repeats in a shaking voice.

Harry thinks fast. He’s probably going to have to think fast a lot in the days and weeks to come. “Here, gimme your arm.” Harry sets the box on the hood of his truck long enough to pull his handcuffs off his belt and chain their wrists together. “There. You’re not going anywhere, now.” He picks up the box again with his free hand. “Let’s go have lunch, Coop.”

Dale raises his eyebrows at Harry, but he doesn’t argue anymore and actually relaxes a little bit somehow. Harry’s confident enough that if anything weird does show up he’ll be able to stop it from dragging his friend away, and apparently Dale can feel that coming through like always.

They start walking. It’s already twenty five minutes into his lunch hour, so Harry’s really starving for some sandwiches and pie right now. He realizes he completely forgot to grab a blanket for them to sit on… oh, well. A little dirt’s not gonna kill them. Besides that, the handcuff thing seems to be helping Dale a lot, but it’s also yanking his wrist pretty hard.

A warm, smooth palm slips into his. “Is that better, Harry?”

“Uh… yeah, it is.”

And so they walk the rest of the way to the meadow holding hands.

Once they get there, Harry unlocks the cuffs and puts them back on his belt, then stamps down a flat spot into the grass and sits. Dale settles cross-legged on his right, watching him. “Harry, I’d like to thank you.”

“Okay, for what?”

“For choosing a location for this picnic that doesn’t resemble what we saw on the videocassette Hawk recovered from Laura’s bedroom.”

Shit. Harry didn’t even think of that… not even picnics are safe, apparently. Even something as stupid and harmless as this isn’t safe.

“I’m sorry, Coop.”

“You have no cause for remorse, Harry. I did agree to this excursion, after all.”

“Yeah, but this is stepping on another one of your mental landmines.” Harry folds open the box and hands Dale a sandwich. “Here, as much of that as you can handle. There’s pie in there, too, but we’ll have that later.”

“Your lunch hour is half-over.”

“I took the afternoon off. We’ll be here awhile.”

“Alright, but why?”

Harry shrugs slightly. “It’s pretty here. I always liked coming to this spot as a kid, I saw a wild turkey here once when I was ten but it wasn’t hunting season so there was nothing I could do.”

“Hence the sandwiches consisting of chicken or tuna salad today instead of being turkey clubs,” Dale guesses, picking open the plastic wrap with his fingertips.

“Yeah,” Harry chuckles. He reaches in a second time and grabs two for himself, peeling open the first one and eating the whole thing in about three bites. Norma makes the best tuna salad in the state, bar none. In that time, Dale eats one corner of his own sandwich. “Take your time, Coop.”

Harry starts in on his second one and looks up at the sky instead of watching his friend eat at the speed of grass growing. It’s a really nice day today and he’s glad that even though he forgot the blanket he at least remembered to spray them both with Off! before they left the station; the ticks and mosquitos won’t get close to them, now.

“Harry?”

“Yeah, Coop.”

“Have you ever climbed one of these trees?”

Harry tears his eyes off the clouds to look at Dale - that’s the closest to normal his friend has sounded since this started, asking about the trees again now.

“The firs?”

“Yes.”

“No, nobody climbs those usually, you’ll end up painted with needles and pitch. Someone’ll mistake you for a porcupine after.” He smiles. “I did break my arm falling out of a tree once… I think I was about six or seven and I missed a whole season of peewee football because of it. Never climbed another tree again after that. You climb any trees when you were a kid, Coop?”

“Many and often,” Dale nods. “Generally to the great annoyance of my neighbors. There were no trees in my yard but I was certainly a climber. Fortunately for them, I outgrew that phase when I discovered easy and accessible means to make their mailboxes explode instead.”

Harry laughs. “I wouldn’t have ever pegged you as a teenage delinquent, Dale.”

“High intelligence incites extreme boredom at times.” Dale takes another bite of his sandwich and chews for awhile. He’s more than halfway through it, which is good. “I once rigged a man’s Christmas lights to give him an electric shock when he plugged them in… fortunately I was never caught for that one.”

“Was he okay?”

“He was very upset, I learned approximately half a dozen new curse words that day.”

“How old were you?”

“Eleven and a half.” Dale takes another bite. “Do you have any comparable experiences from your youth?”

Harry shakes his head. “Most of my stories are about football or getting beat up by Frank… my dad had some issues left over from the war, so we didn’t spend a whole lotta time in the house even when we were little.”

Dale nods. “Understandable, if tragic.”

“It gives me a little perspective, though,” Harry admits. “I kinda thought maybe that’s how it would happen to you after the Black Lodge.”

“Are there any similarities?”

“A couple. Not usually, though. It’s mostly apples and oranges… the perspective is more like that I know why people can get to be the way he was or the way you are. One of my friends in school asked once why my dad couldn’t just be normal. It doesn’t work that way. But there was also nobody around to help him, so he never got better. He’s still just as bad now as when I was a kid.” Harry reaches over and puts his palm on Dale’s upper arm. “I don’t know if you noticed this, but you’re a little bit better already, you’re less shaky than you were a few days ago.”

“By only a minor degree…”

“Yeah, but it’s something.” They should get off this topic. Harry doesn’t want to make Dale upset by accident. “So how high were the trees?”

Dale frowns for a second, then seems to understand what he’s asking. “Nowhere near as tall as the ones that grow here. I believe, if the pitch weren’t such an issue as you’ve described, I would be able to scale one of these incredible Douglas Firs of yours, Harry. I’ve never had trouble with heights.” His eyes turn to those very trees, now. “They’re one of the first things I fell in love with here, Harry… many others followed after, but the trees are the original selling point for me when it comes to Twin Peaks.”

“What are the other things?” Harry asks. This seems like a good thing to talk about.

“The diner, the climate. The clearness of the air and how bright the stars are after dusk. The people… in general, but also some specific examples.”

“Like Annie Blackburn.”

“No, there was someone before her… in fact, someone from essentially the beginning of my time here. This person was not available for me to pursue, and now I would feel uncomfortable approaching them with the idea.”

“Why?” he wonders. “You’re a smart, handsome guy, Coop. Women probably fall over themselves chasing you.”

“At times they follow after me in flocks.”

“Yeah, see?”

“Harry, I don’t have much cause to believe you’d be frightened by my saying so, or else I wouldn’t divulge this information… the subject in question is another man.”

Harry’s so surprised that he forgets how to talk for a really long time. “So… you’re…?”

“I’m bisexual.”

“…oh. Uh. Okay.” Harry swallows as much of his shock as he can. “I never would’ve guessed.”

“Yes, I prefer it that way. It has proven dangerous in the past.”

“Yeah, I guess it would do that, wouldn’t it?” Harry realizes his hand is still on Dale’s arm. He doesn’t move it. “So can I ask who?”

“I’d prefer not to answer that at this time. It’s a delicate issue and I have yet to come to a solution.” Dale shakes his head slightly. “It’s difficult to love a person who presents with my particular set of issues even discounting the recent addition of mental illness. The illness in question puts it to a level of damn near impossible. You’ve already noticed it, Harry… I’m taxing and frustrating and exhausting for you now that I’ve become like this.”

“Yeah, but it’s temporary,” Harry insists, parroting Albert now. He pauses for a second. “This have something to do with Caroline?”

“In part.”

Harry squeezes Dale’s arm a little. “You should get to be loved, Coop.”

“I feel undeserving of such a gift,” Dale confesses softly. “I’ve done nothing to earn it.”

“Yeah, but you don’t earn gifts. People just give them to you for free,” Harry points out.

Dale’s quiet for a second. “I finished the entire sandwich, Harry.”

“Good,” he smiles. “You want another one?”

“Half of one.”

“Coming right up.” Harry rummages the box and hands a new sandwich to him. “Y’know maybe we should just go sit in a field three times a day, you’ll get back to a normal weight in no time.”

“It’s come to a point where I’ll feel weak or light-headed at times,” Dale admits. “Logically I understand that this is due to malnutrition. Logic has very little bearing on my situation however.”

“That’s really dangerous, Coop. We gotta figure out something to get you to eat more.”

“I know, Harry.”

“Your metabolism’s way too high for you to keep going like this… you drink so much coffee, would you also drink hot chocolate? That’s got a bunch of calories in it, it might help.”

“It may be worth a try.”

At least Dale’s eating another sandwich, slowly but surely. He looks sad and tired still, but a little bit less than usual. Getting him outside seems to have helped.

Harry lies back into the grass and looks up at the sky. The clouds are like cotton candy without the pink dye, moving lazily across the blueness like they’re just poking around and don’t actually have anywhere important to be. He did this when he was young, too, sprawl on his back and stare up at the heavens. Sometimes it was to avoid his dad’s craziness, sometimes it was to escape from Frank or his schoolmates or anyone else who wanted to beat him up just for the hell of it. Until now he’s always come here alone.

Even given the circumstances, something feels good and right and important that Dale is the first person he’s brought with him. Because Dale has things he’s hiding from, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Cooper has a brief panic attack.  
> 2\. Cooper finally admits to suffering from a progressing state of malnourishment due to his high metabolism.  
> 3\. Harry briefly discusses his dad suffering war-related PTSD.


	11. The Answer Is Already No

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

“Hey Coop?”

“Yes, Harry?”

He shuffles around a little. Dale’s not sleeping, which means Harry isn’t either, even though it’s almost two in the morning. They’re curled together in the center of the mattress like the last couple nights because it helps stop him from having panic attacks. Dale’s head is tucked under Harry’s chin.

“Can I ask something?’

“It sticks in your mind from earlier that I described myself as being unlovable.”

“Well… yeah.”

“I feel you should be made aware that this isn’t a new sentiment for me. I’ve viewed myself in this light long before I came to Twin Peaks. When Caroline had an affair with me it came as a great shock.”

“Will you even believe me if I say you’re lovable?” Harry asks, already knowing that the answer is no. “There’s no reason for you not to be. I know right now mostly you just think about all the things that’re wrong with you, but there’s a lot that’s right, too.”

“My positive traits tend to be overpowered by the negative ones. The recent inexplicable amplification of my mental gifts makes them into more of a curse of late.”

“Dale, you listen to me. You’re likeable. You’re lovable. You’re a great lawman, you’re a great friend, and as bad as things have gotten for you I’m glad you’re here because nothing would be the same if you just went home after the case ended.”

Dale nods slightly against his neck. “Do you find me particularly lovable, Harry?” he whispers.

Harry doesn’t even think first before answering. “Yeah.” The word leaves his mouth and he almost doesn’t realize he’s the one saying it. What’s even more surprising is how he discovers he’s not just lying to make his friend feel better… he does find Dale lovable. “You’re lovable, Coop.”

Briefly, lightly, Dale kisses his neck before settling again. “Thank you, Harry.”

If it was anyone else, Harry would find that weird. But Dale’s super touchy-feely and affectionate anyway; this feels like the next logical step, really. Harry presses his face into Dale’s hair in response.

“You’re welcome.”

Dale melts into him. “You’re affectionate as well, Harry.”

“A little, I guess, yeah.”

“No, you are. Generally speaking it’s not directed towards very many people… and it only appears in small quantities.” Harry feels him take a deep breath. “Except towards me.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted, Coop.”

“It is. I was only making an observation. You tend to reciprocate most of the physical contact I offer and you very often initiate it yourself these days.”

“Does it… make you uncomfortable? I don’t have to do it so much.”

“No, not at all. In point of fact there are no locations coming to mind I would rather be than in your arms.”

Harry’s face and ears are immediately on fire. “Oh. Uh. Okay. Good.” A light turns on in his brain and it shines on one of the things Dale said during their picnic. He freezes for a moment. “It’s me, isn’t it?”

A sigh brushes his skin. “Yes.”

“I’m not good at relationships, Coop.” That is exactly not what Harry meant to reply with.

“I’m not asking you for one, Harry. It would be impractical and extremely difficult for you.”

“Dale…”

“Harry, much to your detriment and inconvenience, judging by your behavior there is a very strong possibility that you have feelings for me.”

“Don’t say shit like detriment, Coop. And feelings are always inconvenient anyway, that’s nothing special.”

Harry has no idea why he’s saying these things. He dates women.

“You’re taking this very well.”

Harry shakes his head. “Coop, this is the least horrifying thing you’ve said to me in weeks.”

“…I suppose that’s true, isn’t it?” Harry can hear Dale’s frown in his voice. “Given the option I still would’ve chosen a much more gentle way to explain this to you.”

“I think you’re doing just fine,” Harry assures him. “It’s okay, Coop. Besides, usually getting something like this off your chest feels better once you’ve done it.”

“Not necessarily. In one instance it earned me a punch to the jaw. I was considerably younger and less trusting of my intuition at that time, though.”

Harry lets go of Dale with one arm so that he can stroke the backs of his fingers along his friend’s jawline; he can’t imagine how anyone could want to punch Dale. The mild sandpapery texture of Dale’s five-o-clock shadow makes his whole hand tingle.

“I’m sorry you got hit.”

“Harry if ever you find you have five or six years to spare, then you may see fit to apologize for every bad thing that’s happened in my life which you’re in no way responsible for,” Dale remarks.

He chuckles. “I might just do that someday, you never know.” He puts his arm back around Dale like it was before. “So Coop… if the first one of those mailboxes you blew up belonged to a girl you liked, should I be worried about where my letters will end up now?”

Dale starts to tremble after he says that, and Harry gets worried that he did something wrong… until he realizes, with a lot of surprise and a lot of relief as well, that Dale’s trying to hold in a laughing fit. Harry smiles into Dale’s hair and rubs his back.

“I have the feeling that you’ll continue to tease me about that part of the anecdote for some time.”

“Probably not that long. It’s kind of a cute story, though.”

“That’s not a word I would personally use to classify it with, Harry, but thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. I’m just glad I got you to laugh.”

Dale stiffens a little and Harry feels him breathe deeply. “Harry?”

“Yeah, Coop.”

“I would like to… please understand that I meant it when I said I’m not asking you for a relationship, I only… Harry… may I kiss you?”

Harry pauses and thinks about that one for a moment. Should he allow this? Does he even _want_ to allow this? He dates women. He kisses women.

Harry nods. “Okay.”

They have to disentangle and reposition to make it work and Dale hesitates for a little less than a second before actually touching his mouth to Harry’s. Dale tastes like spearmint toothpaste and smells like the fabric softener Harry put in the laundry… even in the dark and too close to see well, he has such pretty eyes.

Harry presses a little deeper into the kiss and both of them close their eyes. His heart’s whacking at the back of his sternum with a sledgehammer as he slides a hand up to the side of Dale’s neck; in turn, there are fingers exploring his shaggy curls in a way that’s weirdly almost shy. Harry gets hit with a sliver of Dale’s mind - apprehension, fear, exhaustion… but also desire and love, there’s so much love in there. Just this tiny glimpse is almost overwhelming for Harry and he wonders how it is to be Dale and be bombarded with that at full strength all the time, to always know how everyone feels and everything they’re thinking.

“It’s hell,” Dale murmurs against his lips.

“I’ll bet,” Harry agrees, and then they’re kissing again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Minor internalized homophobia.


	12. All Points

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of you may hate me for this one.
> 
> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

Something’s not right.

Harry’s got a feeling in his gut telling him that part of his world is disrupted, and maybe it’ll throw his whole world off its axis if he can’t figure out what it is and fix it in time. He hasn’t gotten this feeling very often, but he always trusts it when it comes up. He had it right before Josie died, and that puts him on edge this morning.

Weirdly enough, Dale doesn’t seem to be affected by it at all. After they kissed last night he’s in the best mood Harry’s seen in awhile, eating multiple donuts for breakfast once they get to the station and even smiling at Lucy when she shows up for work.

Something’s not right.

It’s all Harry can think as he comes into the conference room, where Albert and a stack of papers are waiting. “Albert.”

“What’s gotten into Coop?” is the first question.

“He’s getting himself some coffee, he’ll be over in a minute.”

“That’s not what I asked, Truman.”

Harry sits. “I found out yesterday that… he has a thing for me,” he starts. Albert is the last god damn person he wants to share this with, but he also knows there’s no getting out of it.

“It took you until now to realize that?”

“What?”

“I suppose I shouldn’t be exceptionally surprised that you of all people didn’t notice how he’s been drooling after you since probably the second he saw you.” Albert shakes his head. “Now why, I wonder, would your discovery of that fact put him in such a good mood?”

Harry works up his most hostile glare. “All I did was kiss him, Albert.”

“I see.” Albert frowns. “I guess it makes sense, he’s most likely starved for affection until now so the smallest things probably feel like a victory. It’s tragic.”

“Y’know the weird thing is he doesn’t seem… I’m having a pretty strong gut feeling right now, I think something’s gonna happen and it’s not anything good. But Coop hasn’t noticed, or maybe he doesn’t care. Usually he’ll ask me about what I’m thinking the second I have a thought, but not this time.”

Albert’s frown deepens.

“How was he behaving this morning before you came in?”

“Let’s see… he had two cups of coffee like always. I don’t really know what you’re asking.”

“Was there anything unusual? Did you notice him maybe talking more than he has been?”

“No, not at all. He mostly just stared out the kitchen window while he was having his coffee, he said ‘Harry, the morning is especially gorgeous today’ and that was basically it. We got in here and he had three and a half donuts, so I guess he’s starting to eat more normally again.”

Albert looks downright alarmed. “No, everything you just said is a list of red flags. Go get him, I need to talk to him right away.”

“Okay,” Harry agrees, confused and worried. He gets up and heads for the coffee nook. “Coop? Albert wants to talk t…” Dale’s not there. Harry goes out in the hall. “Lucy, did you see where Coop went just now?”

“I think he went to sit in your office, Sheriff.”

“Thanks.” Harry makes the three steps and stops just inside the doorway. “ALBERT!”

“What?”

They both come fully into Harry’s office and Albert looks around while Harry scoops up the piece of typewriter paper that’s been left very purposefully in the middle of his desk.

 _Harry_ _  
_ _it seems imperative by now for me to return to the beginning of my troubles_ _  
_ _I love you_  
_please forgive me_ _  
Dale_

And one of the windows is open as far as it will go. It takes all of a second and a half for Harry to draw the line between the two. His stomach drops into his feet and he hands the note to Albert.

“The beginning of his troubles?”

Harry needs a little longer on that one. “The Black Lodge,” he gasps. “The first few days he kept saying over and over again that he was never supposed to make it out of there.” They head for the door and Harry stops at Lucy’s window. “Lucy, put out an all points for Dale, but make sure it’s clear that he’s not a suspect, we want to put him in protective custody and get him to the hospital as soon as we can.”

Her eyes get huge. “Okay, Sheriff.”

Harry and Albert jump into Harry’s truck and they speed away from the station. “It’s a spot in the middle of the woods. Hopefully we can find him before he goes through.”

“This is exactly what I was worried about,” Albert informs him. “He wasn’t suddenly happy again, Truman. This is what psychology calls a ‘suicide high.’ The victim may act relieved, contented or almost chipper without warning shortly prior to their deaths. This relief is caused by the decision to end their lives and they feel like the pressure’s been lifted from them.”

“We gotta stop him.”

“You’ll find no argument from me.”

Harry would much rather have Hawk with him for this, but at least Albert’s not being a shit. Then Harry realizes it’s because Albert’s almost as scared as he is, and that just makes everything feel worse.

The all points goes out over the radio, and after a couple seconds Harry switches bands and hears Lucy notifying the state police as well: white male, black hair, green eyes, six feet, thirty years old, most likely unarmed and to be placed in protective custody until he can be collected by the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department. Harry feels annoyed for a second because Dale’s eyes are hazel, not green, but then he realizes they usually look mostly-green and that’s probably why Lucy said that. Harry flicks the radio back to the band used by his department.

“Why in god’s name would he want to get back inside the Black Lodge anyway?” Harry wonders aloud as he speeds them in the direction of Ghostwood Forest. “That place was hell for him.”

“There’s no logic at work here,” Albert explains. “The irrational and traumatized part of his mind understands that that’s the source of his problems. It seems possible that he thinks, very erroneously, that if he goes back again he can undo whatever was done to him to hurt his psyche so badly. I wouldn’t put that past him, either. Coop’s always been a compulsive fixer, to put it nicely.”

Since when does Albert put anything nicely? Harry doesn’t actually say that, because there’s no point. The only thing that matters is stopping Dale from doing something indescribably stupid right now.

Harry’s level of panic climbs as they make it all the way to the edge of the woods without spotting Dale. “Albert, if we don’t find him in the next four minutes, we might never see him again,” Harry says as they get out of his truck.

“He escaped once already.”

“Yeah but look how he’s being, I don’t think he’d be able to do it a second time when he’s not in his right mind.”

At least it’s not the middle of the night this time, so they should be able to see him pretty easily if he’s still here, especially since he’s wearing a bright blue plaid shirt and there’s no reason to think he won’t be moving in a straight line like they’re doing. Harry wonders how it’ll be when they get there… will Dale give up and let them take him back, or will they have to drag him to the truck in cuffs? He’s never had to think of his friend this way before, the same way he thinks of a perp or a victim. He doesn’t want to think of Dale this way.

Harry doesn’t want to think of Dale this way because he loves him.

He almost trips when he has that thought.

He loves Dale.

Harry starts running.

Behind him, Albert yells, demanding to know what the hell he thinks he’s doing and that he needs to slow down and pay attention. That’s not happening. Harry needs to be on time, he needs to stop Dale from disappearing forever into a nightmare that shouldn’t exist but does. A tree branch whips him in the face on the way by and he ignores it. Probably someone could shoot him right now and he’d still keep running.

The twelve sycamore saplings come into view.

Centered in their loose ring is the hole, full of dark, slimy oil and edged with white.

And all around the clearing is silence.

There are no birds singing.

No wind disturbing the leaves of the trees.

All there is is the entrance to hell and Harry, whose breaths heave to make the only noise here.

And Dale is nowhere to be seen.

Harry turns his head in every direction he can think of but he doesn’t see his friend. He takes a few more steps, but still there’s nothing. Dale’s not here… Dale’s not anywhere, anymore. He must be back in the Black Lodge, stuck forever.

Harry will never see Dale again.

He stands still for a moment, then drops to his knees. He doesn’t understand. He’ll never understand how Dale could’ve reached the decision that _this_ was the best thing to do. In a way, it’s worse than a death - they could’ve at least had a funeral if this was a death instead. Harry would get to mourn the way people usually do. But there’s no body for this. Dale technically still lives, but no longer exists in everyone else’s reality. Gone forever without a trace.

Harry sits on his heels and lets his shoulders slump forward as he hangs his head. His knuckles rest on the cool earth and he closes his eyes. Albert finally catches up with him.

“…he’s gone?”

Harry finds a nod. “Yeah,” he whispers.

It’s never good enough. _He’s_ never good enough. He loved Josie and she left as he told her so. He loves Dale but didn’t realize in time to say it, and now Dale’s gone, too. Harry’s never good enough to keep people from leaving him behind no matter how much he loves them, apparently. He can’t help wondering what he did to deserve this happening to him twice.

“It wasn’t you, Truman.” Apparently Albert reads minds too, now. “Oftentimes the families and loved ones of suicide victims blame themselves for the actions of the deceased. It’s not usual for me to meet these loved ones in person but I can guarantee you, you especially in fact, that you’re in no way part of the reason why he made this choice.”

“Don’t lie to try and make me feel better, Albert. It’s not gonna work.”

Albert sighs. “I’ve never lied to you, Sheriff.” A long moment of silence, followed by Albert sitting on a rock to his left a couple feet away. “I’ve known him for most of his career… I’ve seen how he works and how he thinks. I could tell how much he loved you right away the first time I came to your town. This had nothing to do with you.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Suicide happens when a man is more afraid to live than he is to die. I know you saw that in him the last couple weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much fear in one person before.”

“I wanted… Albert, we were trying to help him…”

“I know.” Albert looks to some point out in the trees instead of at Harry. “But sometimes, for some people, there is no help. I wanted him to get better, too. All the shit I’ve seen him go through, he deserved to stay here with you after this and be happy.”

Harry’s so crushed that he can’t even cry. This is the second time this has happened to him. “I don’t think I get to be happy, Albert.”

He thinks Albert is about to say something when his radio crackles and interrupts them both.

_“Sheriff Truman this is CMH-EMS, do you have a copy?”_

Harry slowly pulls it off his belt, wondering what the hell an ambulance wants to bother him with right now. “Copy.”

_“We’re transporting a vic to the hospital that matches your description for the all-points.”_

“You are? ID him for me?”

_“White male, six feet, black hair, green eyes, about a hundred and fifty five pounds. Out of state driver’s license, ‘Cooper, Dale B, born 1959’.”_

This can’t be right. “Where’d you find him?”

_“Railroad worker just over the state line called 911 about a man jumping off a bridge.”_

“Is he alive?” Harry gets to his feet as he talks.

_“Despite his best efforts, Sheriff.”_

Harry and Albert start walking back the way they came. “What happened to him?”

_“Right tib-fib fracture, abdominal swelling, chest pain, respiratory distress, vomiting. We pulled him out of the water and resuscitated him.”_

“Thanks, tell the hospital we’re on our way.”

_“Will do, Sheriff.”_

None of this makes sense to Harry. “But he said he was going to where it all started for him… isn’t that here?”

Albert frowns. “Ronette Pulaski was found on that bridge following Laura’s murder. If she hadn’t crossed the state line, Coop never would’ve come here in the first place.”

That in no way makes this situation better, because it means Dale really was just trying to die. Harry feels sick as they walk. Dale apparently threw himself off a railway bridge, broke his leg, and almost drowned. None of those things are what Harry wanted to hear. He went in completely the wrong direction and because of that Dale was this close to dying.

Albert jumps in again. “Stop that.”

“What?”

“I know exactly what’s going on in your head, Truman. Stop it.”

Neither of them says anything else for the rest of the walk back to Harry’s truck. He drops Albert off at the station first.

“I’m gonna go see him by myself. You can talk to him later on, but it’s probably better for me to go alone right now.”

“I will have to question him and write up a report on this for the Bureau.”

“Yeah, I know, but… that can wait, Albert.”

Driving to the hospital gets Harry all nervous. He imagines watching Dale puke up river water and then cry a lot after they’ve stuck him through with tubes in a room that stinks of rubbing alcohol. Maybe Dale will be lucky enough to get pumped full of valium or something and he won’t have to be awake for awhile, which means Harry’s going to end up sitting there for hours with nobody to talk to.

It’s actually somehow worse than what he’s expecting, because at first they won’t let him in to see Dale. The doctors have to finish putting his leg back where it belongs and then he needs chest x-rays, apparently, to see how much water is still in his lungs. So now, Harry gets to sit in the waiting area.

Almost three and a half hours later, Doc Hayward comes over.

“Harry. I think I can guess why you’re here.”

“Is he gonna be okay, Will?”

He sighs, slowly and quietly. “Not right away, no.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

Doc Hayward sits in the empty chair next to him. “He broke both the bones in his lower leg, but that wasn’t a hard fix. The real problem is the extreme fluid aspiration… we were halfway through setting his leg when he started showing signs of acute respiratory distress syndrome. He’s in intensive care now and he’ll probably be there for awhile. He could end up with pneumonia, but we’ve put him on antibiotics so hopefully we can avoid that. And none of this is anywhere close to the problems of his mental state.”

Harry nods. “I’m gonna probably end up cuffing him to his bed up there so he can’t try anything else.”

“You won’t have to, he’s too weak and too badly injured to get anywhere on his own. His lungs will give out if he tries.”

“How long will you keep him here?”

“That’s hard to say… ARDS is a tricky condition, it could take awhile.”

“Is he awake right now? I need to talk to him.”

“He is, but you really shouldn’t, Harry. We have him on oxygen and we want to keep from putting him on a ventilator, so long conversations should be avoided right now.” Doc Hayward stands up. “But he also knows you’re here, and he asked for you before I came down.”

They ride up on the elevator and Doc Hayward leads him to what turns out to be one of only two private rooms. Harry takes off his hat and closes the door behind him, then sits in the chair beside the bed and takes in the horrible sight in front of him. Dale’s skin isn’t quite the right color, he’s covered in wires and full of tubes just like Harry feared. His right leg is in a brand-new cast and propped up on a stack of pillows. There’s a plastic mask over his nose and mouth to feed him oxygen from the wall hookup.

“You don’t look so good, Coop.”

“I believe this is an approximation of how roadkill feels on the highway,” Dale croaks through the mask.

“Hey, don’t talk, Doc Hayward says your lungs are real bad right now.” Harry reaches up and sweeps the hair back from his forehead so that it’s out of his eyes. “All you gotta do right now is rest up and let them get back to normal so you can come home with me.”

“Harry…”

“Shhh.” Harry picks up Dale’s hand and kisses the knuckles, then rubs it gently between his palms. “It’s okay, Coop.”

“It isn’t, though.”

“Well then it will be later on.” He kisses the backs of Dale’s fingers. “I love you.”

Dale’s head shakes against the pillow. “But that’s such a terrible idea, Harry.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m a difficult person to love.”

“You’re not,” he argues. “And it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

“But Harry-”

“Dale, I want you to stop talking so that your lungs can heal.”

The tears start to roll down. He doesn’t mean for them to. Dale pulls his hand free and brushes one from the inside corner of Harry’s eye with his thumb.

“Harry, I’m sorry I did this…”

“Yeah. I know you are.” Harry looks at the floor. “I wish you didn’t ask me to forgive you in that note, Coop. I had nothing to do with this so you shouldn’t have thought you had to do that.”

“But I knew this would hurt you.”

“You’re still here. That’s all I care about.” Harry sniffs inward, hard, and wipes his face on his hand. “I just wanted you to still be here with me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Cooper attempts to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge and is left with a number of severe injuries as a result.
> 
> Incidentally - the weight the paramedic on the radio lists Cooper as, 155 lbs, is deliberately underweight for his height because he was skinny to begin with and has barely been eating. This choice was made on purpose.


	13. Epiloge - Relationships And Cherry Pie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

It takes five weeks for Dale to be released from the hospital.

The only upside to any of this is that because he originally became incapacitated in the line of duty, the FBI is still shelling out for his medical bills. This means that when Dale’s through the worst of whatever the hell ARDS actually is and pneumonia takes over, he can just stay put and get treated in intensive care where he already was to begin with. Meanwhile he also has to get two kinds of physical therapy - one for his busted leg, the other to get his lungs back up to snuff so that they can wean him off the oxygen feed. It’s a long process and he’s in pain a lot because of it. They teach him how to use crutches so that he can move around a little more on his own.

Harry visits Dale every single day that he’s there and has to watch all of this. Harry brings donuts or pie or something, always with coffee, to try and cheer him up even at the beginning when it’s still almost too hard for him to eat. For the last two weeks of this, Dale’s finally moved from intensive care to a ward because they’re keeping an eye on him for psychiatric issues instead of his lungs once his respiratory therapy doesn’t need to be so rigorous.

Harry makes sure to tell Dale he loves him at least once during each of these visits. Dale starts saying it back after the second or third time. Sometimes Harry goes home after these feeling better because he can see the improvements and that Dale will probably be discharged soon. Other times he goes home and cries because he’s afraid, so afraid, that Dale will try to do this again and maybe succeed on the next attempt. Still other times he goes home and drinks, thinking about how long it’s going to take until Dale gets over this and knowing it’ll probably be years because that’s what Albert said.

Thirty seven days after Dale jumped off a bridge and almost drowned, Harry goes home and has Dale with him again.

“I moved back some of the furniture so you can get around easier,” he says as he drives.

“Thank you, Harry, that’s very considerate.”

“How long until that thing comes off?”

“Four more weeks, but I’ll still be required to use the crutches for some amount of time after to allow the healing process to complete itself. Doctor Hayward informed me that at the beginning there will be lingering stiffness and weakness until the muscles have been used enough to recover.”

“I’ll pick up some milk or something for you, that way you can get calcium.”

Dale nods and then completely changes the subject. “Harry, there needs to be a discussion.”

“Okay, about what, Coop?”

“About… us. The considerations and implications of there being an ‘us’ in the sense that we’re a unit. Are we in a relationship. It needs to be discussed very carefully.”

“Well do you want there to be an ‘us’?” Harry asks.

“Yes, I do, but at one point-”

“Coop I think you’re way overthinking this,” he butts in. “I can’t think of any reasons why we _shouldn’t_ be in a relationship and it looks pretty established by now that we love each other. That seems about as straightforward as it gets to me.”

“But Harry, I’m - for lack of a better word - a mess right now.”

“Yeah, and?” Harry shakes his head. “You won’t be a mess forever, Dale. And I don’t feel like waiting around until you’re not one anymore. I know it’s not easy, but most relationships aren’t easy at first anyway. And besides that I wanna help you to stop being a mess.”

“You’ve put some amount of thought into this topic prior to our current discussion.”

“Of course I have.”

Dale folds his hands together and looks thoughtful. “Previously you’ve said, and I quote, ‘I’m not good at relationships, Coop.’”

“Yeah…”

“Why did you say so? Are there areas of being in a relationship where you require improvement or have you simply been extremely unlucky?”

“Maybe a little of both. It’s happened before that I was too trusting too quickly. And you saw what happened with Josie, I was in denial about what was going on with her right to the end.” Harry sighs. “But I also don’t think you would trick me like she did. I haven’t been in that many relationships to begin with, and pretty much every single time I ran into them headfirst. I already know you.”

“Generally speaking my relationships so far have been extremely unsuccessful as well.”

“I know. That’s okay.”

Dale’s quiet for awhile. He doesn’t say anything until Harry’s pulling them into the driveway.

“Harry.”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I would like for us to be in a relationship.”

Harry smiles. “Yeah, me too.” He turns off his truck and leans across the center to kiss Dale briefly. “I’ve got leftovers from the diner in the fridge and most of a cherry pie. Let’s go eat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> 1\. Brief allusions to Harry suffering some form of alcoholism.

**Author's Note:**

> Due to the quarantine, I'm changing the update times to twice a week - Mondays and Fridays.
> 
> All my Twin Peaks fics can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&include_work_search%5Brelationship_ids%5D%5B%5D=127943&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&user_id=Aaron_The_8th_Demon).
> 
> As an addendum, the title of this fic relates to the book Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Aleksyevich… it indirectly quotes something said by a woman who watched her husband's body tear itself apart over the course of about two weeks. Pertaining to my use of this as the title, you may interpret that however you want.
> 
> Comments would be great if you have them :)


End file.
